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

[Xue Fuqiao <xfq.free@gmail.com>]

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.

* Perhaps our effort on (info "(elisp) GNU Emacs Internals") is not
  enough.  (Although it's almost impossible to document the ins and outs
  of the Emacs Lisp interpreter, the redisplay code, and other C
  infrastructure in Emacs, let alone having them updated.)

* There is a deeper going split between the core developers and the rest
  of the community (this one is not specific to C/Lisp, and has many
  technical and non-technical reasons).

* Many times, discussions on emacs-devel are defensive rather than
  constructive (not specific to C either).

* Emacs runs on all versions of Windows from Windows 98 and Windows NT
  4.0 through to Windows 10, and even MS-DOS (although msdos.c is pretty
  easy to read).  I'm not sure whether the maintenance burden is worthy.
  (Anyway, Eli, I have great respect for you and your contributions to Emacs.)

* Many developers think that the indentation style of the GNU Coding
  Standards is ugly (as condemned by the Linux kernel coding style guide
  ;-).

Currently, I don't have any concrete proposal to figuring out a
practical solution, but I'll do my bit and try to improve Emacs's
condition.