Re: tree-sitter and emacs-devel

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2020 11:13:31 -0400
> 
> >> > I remember a similar situation on the emacs-bidi mailing list 15 years
> >> > ago when the bidirectional editing support for Emacs was just a pipe dream.
> >> That was a completely different situation.  tree-sitter is very far from
> >> a pipe dream (the initial Git commit dates back to 2013).
> > You may not remember it, but at the time I mentioned we had a working
> > prototype of bidi Emacs.  It was even demonstrated at a conference in
> > Japan in the year 2000.  So the situation is not really that
> > different.
> 
> But AFAIK noone here is planning to implement a new parser to *replace*
> tree-sitter

No one was planning to replace the bidi prototype back then, either.
(And I don't really see how this aspect could be relevant to this part
of the discussion.)

In general, I find it puzzling that you apparently say we shouldn't
try providing guidance to developers who are working on important
features.  Without us passing our knowledge and experience, how would
they learn from past mistakes? how will they avoid making some of
those mistakes time and again?  Our experience includes things we
tried and failed, it includes techniques we found to be expensive or
dangerous or non-scalable.  None of that is written anywhere except in
our memory, so the only way to pass that knowledge is to speak up
regarding which methods and algorithms should be preferred to others.
How can we help except by guidance based on that experience?  Are we
supposed to do the work ourselves, so that no one could say we are
acting as "backseat drivers"?