Re: req-package

[Rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com>]

On Sunday, August 16, 2015 at 3:08:18 PM UTC+5:30, Edward Knyshov wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 12:10 PM Rusi  wrote:
> 
> > On Sunday, August 16, 2015 at 2:21:41 PM UTC+5:30, Les Harris wrote:
> > > I am just a normal user when it comes to use-package but it has
> > > completely changed how I manage configuration for emacs.  I've been
> > > following the recent threads on here keenly.
> > >
> > > I just wanted to say that this vision of use-package as a foundational
> > > framework is very exciting from an end-user's standpoint and I look
> > > forward to seeing what results may come.
> >
> > Yes
> > The one thing that is not coming out in these threads or the docs is that
> > use-package (req-package??¹) is hi-level declarative/functional whereas the
> > builtin methods are low-level imperative.
> >
> > The closest that the builtin methods are functional is
> > (require 'feature)
> > vs the more imperative
> > (load "feature")
> >
> > However as soon as one wants to go from there to something a bit more
> > sophisticated eg add-hook, autoload, eval-after-load etc it all becomes
> > mind-numbingly sequence-sensitive.
> >
> > ---------------------------------------
> > ¹ As is stands req-package adds a key functional feature - dependency graph
> > verification. However from what is currently being discussed here it looks
> > to
> > be getting more imperative.
> >

> Hi.
> 
> First thing we need to figure out is does use-package provide flexible
> enough api to implement req-package as new use-package keyword.
> Currently it works by calling (use-package ...) forms when corresponding
> are packages a ready to configure.
> We need a full control over packages loading flow, because we need to
> rearrange some stuff to get all this dance work.

Err... I need to change my hat :-)
As an ordinary programmer, functional is generally better than imperative.

However with implementer hat on I know that the more fancy-ly declarative
a language is the more complex the internals are going to be.
After all its a conservation law -- someone somewhere needs to think the
messy parts.  Just better to do it once-and-for-all and to forget thereafter.
So thanks you guys -- you and John -- for doing the messy work to help
us keep our inits short, sequence-tolerant logically organized and zippy.

And just to remind, I jumped into these threads because I would like to hand
out to my students, init-fragments that are not so long arcane and messy as they
currently have to be. [Anyways they think I am nuts for using emacs...
So not too many available degrees of freedom :-) 
]