Re: [PATCH] Add prettify symbols to python-mode

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2015 22:12:30 +0800
>> From: Xue Fuqiao <xfq.free@gmail.com>
>> Cc: Achim Gratz <Stromeko@nexgo.de>, Emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
>> 
>> On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 3:13 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>> > One of the gravest problems I see for the future of Emacs development
>> > is that we slowly but steadily lose old-timers who know a lot about
>> > the Emacs internals and have lots of experience hacking them, whereas
>> > the (welcome) newcomers mostly prefer working on application-level
>> > code in Lisp.  If this tendency continues, we will soon lose the
>> > ability to make deep infrastructure changes, i.e. will be unable to
>> > add new features that need non-trivial changes on the C level.
>> 
>> Yes, this is also what I see.  As a "newcomer" (in comparison with most
>> Emacs hackers on this list, who have been contributing to Emacs for much
>> longer than me, and have a deeper understanding of the system as a
>> whole), some possible causes for this problem are:
>> 
>> * Hacking on the C level is inherently more difficult than the Lisp
>>   (application) level.
>
> I don't see why.  C is not a complicated language, and a large part of
> the Emacs source code never touches its relatively more problematic
> parts, like memory allocation.

C may not be a complicated language but it offers no significant
in-language features for integrating data structures and their
manipulators.  As a consequence, working with Elisp data in C does not
resemble either working with C or with Lisp.

-- 
David Kastrup