10 problems with Elisp, part 10 (was: Re: Emacs website, Lisp, and other)

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2024 at 5:03 AM
> From: "Emanuel Berg" <incal@dataswamp.org>
> To: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: 10 problems with Elisp, part 10 (was: Re: Emacs website, Lisp, and other)
>
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
> > There's nothing more natural than an editor analyzing text
> > in a buffer. Why it frustrates you is beyond me.
>
> Sure, as is analyzing chemical substances in chemistry.
>
> And it is well known that instead of using machines and
> well-known methods from the outside to do the job, the
> chemists are swimming around in the substances mucking around
> with individual molecules giving explicit instructions what
> should happen for each case?
>
> Oh, no, all computing is the same, basically, we have of
> course specific problems and applications here, but instead of
> doing the old thing we should move up one level of abstraction
> and be there instead, and focus not on "getting the job done"
> but instead getting it done in a way that is much better than
> what we - to a large extent - have been doing so far.
>
> Everyone has a problem domain with specific characteristics
> that isn't the same as do stuff on the detail level,
> "everyone" doesn't do that if that is what you thought.
>
> > Emacs Lisp is not a general-purpose programming language.
>
> It doesn't matter what it is, it can be better, we should aim
> for that.
>
> > It is a language for implementing Emacs and Emacs
> > extensions. Thus, comparing it with Python is, in general,
> > simply wrong.
>
> Yes, Python is incomparable to Emacs Lisp and would probably
> win quite even against the collective Lisp world, I'm afraid.

Python is not great.  But people can believe what they want.

Sometimes we discover unpleasant truths. Whenever we do so, we
are in difficulties: suppressing them is scientifically dishonest,
so we must tell them, but telling them, however, will fire back on us.
If the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically
incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally
unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary, foolishly
gullible or what have you.

Most Computer Science Departments have opted for the easy way out, to
pretend that problems do not exist.  Programming is one of the most
difficult branches of applied mathematics; most mathematicians should
better remain pure mathematicians.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
have had a prior exposure to Python, as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just
to be sure. Today they stick to Python, so that they can share each
other's programs, bugs included.

> Lisp would probably loose to some other languages as well.
>
> > We can compare a few specific aspects, but not the languages
> > as a whole, and definitely not their success rate: the scope
> > of Emacs Lisp is limited to Emacs, which is orders of
> > magnitude more narrow than the scope of Python (or any other
> > general-purpose programming language).
>
> Emacs is the bastion of Lisp, if we care about Lisp we should
> do what we can to make Elisp more competitive altho we should
> focus on getting better, and not compare us to other languages
> as we are way too far behind in many areas, I'm afraid.
>
> --
> underground experts united
> https://dataswamp.org/~incal
>
>
>