Re: Common vs Emacs Lisp (was: Re: return)

[Chad Brown <yandros@MIT.EDU>]

On Dec 3, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Fren Zeee wrote:
> 
> Why not just throw the whole elisp and use CL to run emacs with
> lexical scoping ?
> 
> What particular advantages do there accrue from the dyn scoped elisp
> and by incrementally making fixes to this dinosaur ?

Conservatively, I'll say at least 10,000 programmer-hours of existing, heavily
used (by emacs standards) elisp libraries, systems, programs, etc.

There are/have been projects that recreate emacs in Scheme, Common 
Lisp, and Tcl (that I know of).  None of them have done very well when
forced head-to-head with Emacs (Tcl doing the best, due to environment).

I suspect that I'd get widespread agreement from emacs developers to
a statement like the following:

	Common Lisp contains some good stuff that I'd like to see in Emacs 
	and a large amount of stuff that I'd never want to see in Emacs, even
	if it meant giving up the former.

..and that assumes that someone else magically does the work.

For CL in particular, it looks like Climacs could use some help.

*Chad