Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

Dani Moncayo <dmoncayo@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm a beginner in Elisp, and have a question (just for curiosity):
>
> Go to the Emacs Lips Manual (edition 3.0 / Emacs 24.0.50), section
> "1.2 Lisp History". The last paragraph reads like this:
>
>>    Emacs Lisp is not at all influenced by Scheme; but the GNU project
>> has an implementation of Scheme, called Guile.  We use Guile in all new
>> GNU software that calls for extensibility.
>
> ...so my question is: If GNU Emacs was to be started from scratch
> today, would Guile be better than ELips as extensibility language?
>

In short, yes, guile would probably be a better extension language than
elisp, which has some real limitations. There has been a lot of
discussion about this over the years. In general, most acccept that
guile would be better, but the issue is all the legacy elisp code that
would be lost and the amount of work that would need to be done to get
the same level of functionality we already have. 

While we may see an emacs like editor with guile as the extension
language at some point in the future, though I doubt it, I suspect it
will be a totally new beastie. Imagine an emacs that is multi-threaded,
has an extension language with namespaces, closures, etc and can start
without any of the old 'baggage' and learns from the wealth of
experience gained over the past 40 years. Could be a truely wonderful
thing. At the same time, consider all the effort and work that has gone
into the fine editor we now have and the amount of work it would take to
get the same functionality - a huge task. Then combine that with the
wealth of alternatives and the fact I think most people are now use to
using many different programs. There is an argument that would suggest
we are better off with distinct programs that all do one thing, but do
it really well rather than one large program that tries to do
everything. If you use emacs just as an editor, what level of power do
you really need in an extension language. While elisp may have some real
limitaitons, most of these don't greatly impact on things you want to do
with it that are diretly relevant to an editor. Most of the limitations
apear to become an issue when you start writing extensions to do things
other than those directly relating to editing of text i.e. web browser,
mail readers, chat /IM clients, etc. 

Tim



-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au