Re: what is the important uses of emacs lisp?

[Evans Winner <thorne@timbral.net>]

Michael Ekstrand <michael@elehack.net> writes:

    Now, to attempt to answer your question: everything.
    Emacs Lisp is used for extending, customizing, and
    implementing Emacs.  Most of Emacs itself is written in
    Emacs Lisp.  Emacs users use Emacs Lisp to customize
    their Emacs (setting variables and writing functions in
    their .emacs file, typically) and add new features to
    it.  Software developers use Emacs Lisp to write new
    packages adding additional features and capabilities to
    Emacs.
 
But seriously folks, why, why, oh why is Emacs so rare in
this regard?  I mean, maybe I'm just another Emacs religious
nut, but I just can't fathom why anyone wants their software
to be exclusively mouse-driven, rigid, inflexible,
un-extensible, un-customizable, un-self-documenting, non
language-based, etc.  I really am surprised sometimes that
the whole lisp machine concept never took off.  I mean, I'm
not really surprised -- after all, originally most people
who could benefit from PCs knew nothing about them and were
understandably intimidated and so they welcomed the whole
point-and-grunt model of machine-human interaction.  But
now?  Sheesh.  Isn't it time for people to start using
computers like intelligent civilized humans?

And just when I thought it couldn't get any worse than the
old Macintosh model of if-it-ain't-got-a-button-
it-ain't-gonna-happen user interface, now everybody wants to
write their user interface in some kind of Frankenstein's
monster of web browser typesetting widgets and ad-hoc
scripting languages and the result is that while at least
the data entry people could really get good with keyboarding
around the green screen crud screens once upon a time, now
even the best of them is reduced to the data throughput
level of a three year old[1].

At least that's how it seems to me.

I'm on a bit of a rampage of late because I just took a new
sysadmin job and found that the IT department policies are
so absurdly strict that I can't even install my choice of
text editors on the PC there.  There is a short (very short)
list of allowed software (almost all of it proprietary, of
course) and I'm just stuck with it.  There I am running a
million-dollar system running (nee) OS/400 and on the front
end I'm stuck with Windows and notepad.exe.  Point...
grunt...  point...  grunt.

I'm so extremely sorry to have wasted everyone's time with
all this ranting... though evidently not sorry enough to
rethink sending it.

Anyway, long live Emacs lisp.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Not that I have anything against the mouse or GUIs; on
the contrary I think they can be very useful.  I just don't
think they are a good substitute for those things... for
which they are not a good substitute... like, er, most user
input, for instance.