Re: Guile in Emacs

[John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>]

On Apr 14, 2010, at 1:02 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Common Lisp is extremely complicated and ugly.  When I wrote GNU Emacs
> I had just finished implementing Common Lisp, and I did not like it
> much.  It would bloat Emacs terribly, and documenting it would be hard
> too.

Do you mean the libraries are?  Because the core syntax of CL is pretty simple.  Also, with Scheme there are several core semantic differences from Emacs Lisp: a) It's a Lisp-1, and b) the difference between nil, () and #f.  Those two right there can make porting any significant Emacs application extremely difficult.

As for Common Lisp -- or let's say, a functional subset for the purpose of making it an Emacs extension language -- if, as some suggest, it's worthwhile to ignore existing code and start afresh, why isn't a project like CLmacs more interesting?  It's very Emacs like, but lacks all the useful libraries which make Emacs what it is.

Personally I think adopting a new internal language for Emacs, just so GNU can have a common scripting language, is somewhat ludicrous.  Emacs Lisp has proven itself to be incredibly useful, as shown by the enormous number of contributors and extensive library of code -- some of which has seen extensive usage for a decade or more now.  It may have its warts, but so will any system by the time its use\x01rs are done with it.

Lastly, I'm not at all convinced Emacs Lisp needs multithreading.  I would prefer a coarser model of process separation to allow things like Gnus to run in tandem with other tasks.  It would be nice if a wholly separate process could connect to the frames/windows/buffers (but not symbol space) of a master Emacs process.  I was just considering yesterday the truly scary-to-debug scenarios that come up when you realize dynamic variables can change mid-form, or that hooks might run while other hooks are executing.  There is so much code that depends on sequence of execution that I think multithreading could cause us stability headaches for years and years.

John