Re: 10 problems with Elisp, part 10

["Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>]

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Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> writes:

> Dr Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
>
>> After having seen how I could write interactive indentation
>> highlighting in wisp-mode in a few hours of hacking and
>> a few dozen lines of code [...]
>
> Excellent, now have a look at ispell.el - 4 323 lines - or
> flyspell.el that is 2 393 lines - you can reduce it a lot,
> I take it.

That’s not my point.

My point is that the buffer as abstraction is already pretty good.

If you forgo that, you add a lot of complexity with finding the right
entry points, defining how elisp should interact with text — all while
increasing the separation from regular editing, so creating a package
requires a higher up-front investment to find the right APIs.

As a counter-point: An example of a higher level of abstraction is the
org-mode API. But thinking back how long it took me to get that to
actually do what I needed, I doubt that that’s the model I want for most
packages. But I agree that without this, what I wrote would have been
more brittle.
Another example for specialized APIs that are used by others, too, are
completion APIs — auto-complete or company.


Currently Emacs is the environment I know that has the lowest barrier of
entry for writing a package. To check my memory on that, I now looked at
an IntelliJ plugin that just does replace-regex, and that clocks in at
about 200 LOC, using specialized entry points. To get another sample, I
checked a VS-code extension that just flashes the region on copy. To
implement the equivalent of
    (if mark-active (list (point) (mark)) '())
it needs 20 lines of code.


That said: going by the example of the orgmode API and completion APIs,
building specialized APIs for certain tasks and releasing them as
packages could be a way to move forward to experiment with abstractions.
If similar APIs prove useful for very different tasks, and other people
start using them, that would build a case that generalizing them and
integrating them in Emacs and elisp as a default API could be a good way
forward.


Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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