Re: About Emacs Modernisation Project

[pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)]

Evans Winner <thorne@unm.edu> writes:

> LanX <lanx.perl@googlemail.com> writes:
>
>     No name spaces, no real lexical variables [...]
>
> These are not bugs, they are features.  One uses the right
> tool for the job.  It is highly unlikely that the language
> of choice for serious hackers working on developing large,
> complex systems is going to be the same language chosen for
> casual text editor users who want to quickly and simply
> customize some element of their editor.  

Possibly.  However, if emacs was reprogrammed in Common Lisp, you
could have both.  Naive users could be provided with an environment
with only dynamic binding and a unique namespace, while sophisticated
programmers could use all the features of Common Lisp.  Also, as
mentionned in another post, it would be easier to implement other
user-friend scripting languages in Common Lisp than in emacs lisp.



> If I had to put up
> with thinking about bugs from counter-intuitive effects of
> lexical bindings, or package problems when writing code to
> do every simple thing I want Emacs to do, I'd just forget
> the whole stupid thing and go back to notepad.exe -- or more
> precisely, a non-programmer like me would never have even
> gotten a start with it.  I've written some reasonably useful
> code -- at least for my own purposes, and as a result of my
> work with Emacs I have even learned a bit of Common Lisp,
> but I don't think that I am alone in that for me Emacs Lisp
> is just the exactly right language.  It is simple and
> intuitive while retaining a good deal of the expressiveness
> of a Lisp.

Just write one emacs lisp program slightly more complex, and you'll
see that you'd rather program text processing scripts in Common Lisp.



> If what you want to implement requires industrial-strength
> language features, why do you want to implement it in a text
> editor?

No, that's the other way.  Why isn't this text editor implemented in
an industrial-strength language.  History, of course. But it should be
time to correct history errors.  Otherwise have a look at Climacs.


> -- I mean, I know there are borderline cases, like
> gnus, which I use and which is a pretty large and complex
> system, but for most purposes, I think Emacs Lisp actually
> encourages the production of a lot of little, useful hacks.

Unmaintainable hacks.  That's the problem for me with emacs lisp code,
it's often unmaintable, overly complex, and badly programmed.


> Using a language like Python or Guile scheme doesn't strike me as
> being as likely to encourage that kind of thing.
>
> P.S.  Climacs, which Pascal mentioned, is useless to me
> anyway, because it won't work in a TTY.  I can't imagine
> never wanting to just shell into a system and go, without
> having to tunnel X and all that rot.

Yes, I'd like it to work on a terminal too.  Clearly, we need more
time!

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/