Re: About Emacs Modernisation Project

[LanX <lanx.perl@googlemail.com>]

> > I think Emacs Lisp actually
> > encourages the production of a lot of little, useful hacks.
>
> Indeed.  But lexical scoping and name spaces wouldn't make any
> difference in this respect.

But the lack of namespaces leads to very long names which IMHO
irritate newbies.

At least it did irritate me at the time to find out that I need to
type "M-x font-lock-fontify-buffer" to get highlighting, and it still
irritates others when I explain  to do so.

Snippets manipulating different aspects of font-lock would look less
intimidating, without the need to repeat "font-lock-" 20 times.

And something like customize-group NAME-SPACE wouldn't need to list
the prefix NAME-SPACE-... for each option.

IMHO the option to use shorter identifiers for functions and variables
would increase the acceptance of elisp and emacs!

You might think that it's only a matter of getting used to, but maybe
you should better ask the folks who turned away maybe thinking that a
system with >20 char identifiers is far too complicated...

When manipulating the DOM of a browser with JS I have standard
mechanisms to considerately shorten the path to a variable or
function.

Are there any in eLisp?