Re: Taming some chaos

["John Wiegley" <johnw@newartisans.com>]

>>>>> John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org> writes:

> Apart from any IDE functionality there are general weaknesses in Emacs'
> current collection of packages that I think represents a significant barrier
> to bringing in new recruits, both users and developers. I want to argue that
> most packages dabble in too many areas and are coded in too imperative a
> manner. Such shortcoming can be understood in light of the era and
> technological setting in which many Emacs conventions and paradigms were
> first developed. But that does not alter the fact that the state of
> computing / UX / what-have-you has advanced significantly.

I can't really argue with your assessment, John.

However, I think that ship has sailed. The changes you propose in your message
would require a ground-up redesign of many aspects of Emacs, would they not?
We have so much extant Emacs Lisp code, and lot of Emacs' value lies in that
code, and not merely in its fundamentals.

At this point, we can design new abstractions to be used by new code; but we
can't change how fundamental things are done in a way that suddenly makes
Emacs far less capable by breaking reams of existing code.

John