6 ms·

Good to see more people working on editors for Lisp, but I don't really see this as an improvement over the (immaculate, IMO) Paredit for Emacs.

ScottBurson 11y ago
Yes, those of us who have been editing Lisp using Paredit-like commands for years [0] may not find that much value here. But I think we're not the target audience; the goal is to help get newcomers over the hump, and that will be a wonderful thing if it works. [0] 35 years, in my case. David Chapman and I implemented balanced-parenthesis editing commands for Zmacs (the Lisp Machine editor) in 1980. To my knowledge, it was the first such implementation for a text editor; the Interlisp structure editor already existed, but was considered hard to use.
- mbrock 11y ago
  This Chapman, I assume? https://meaningness.wordpress.com/about-david-chapman/ https://meaningness.wordpress.com/about-david-chapman/ I'm something of a fan. This article is great, about his history at MIT's artificial intelligence lab, Ken Wilber, Heidegger, and Buddhism. http://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence http://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artifi...
  - ScottBurson 11y ago
    Yep, that's him! Thanks for the links -- I had lost track of him and hadn't seen his blog.
    - mbrock 11y ago
      :) Here he is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/meaningness https://twitter.com/meaningness While sleuthing a bit on Google I realize he was also a contributor to the "UNIX-HATERS handbook." Weirdly, that was really fascinating literature to me as a ... 15 year old, maybe, in like 2004? In my Swedish teenage room full of messed up Linux and OpenBSD boxes, reading everything I could that seemed interesting and intelligent. That handbook, the C2 wiki, various mailing lists, Usenet groups, IRC channels... I attribute a lot of my personality and interests to this nerdy/literate heritage.
      - ScottBurson 11y ago
        Yes. I'm in the UHH too :-) Bottom of p. 211.
Blackthorn 11y ago
This is a huge improvement imo, and something that should be seen as a great advancement in usability. We've gone from needing to use hotkeys (paredit) to not needing to use them and having the machine figure out what you want to do. Maybe others have different opinions, but I find this way of doing things a lot more natural and usable. It's like an old Oblivion mod for archery that asked the question: "Why do other archery mods have a hotkey for denocking your arrow? We just automatically denock if you look at the ground. It just makes sense."
- Illotus 11y ago
  This. It may not be huge for someone who is accustomed to those hotkeys, but for everyone this is a big deal. Imagine not having to commit those hotkeys to (muscle) memory at all.
danneu 11y ago
If it lets people write lisp with the same ease of writing Javascript or Python (i.e. without investing time learning a tool specifically for editing s-expressions), then that's an advantage over Paredit kinda like Sublime's advantage over Vim/Emacs. Trying it out in Atom, it looks really promising. You just kinda start writing, like on the blank line at the end of a function body, and Parinfer fills in the parens depending on your indentation level in an intuitive fashion, merging your form into the tree above it. In fact, it seems to strictly complement Paredit. Parinfer puts the parens where you want them, and Paredit is there for explicitly editing the tree.
- davexunit 11y ago
  > kinda like Sublime's advantage over Vim/Emacs. Sublime is trash compared to Emacs.
  - roryokane 11y ago
    danneu wasn’t necessarily saying that Sublime is better than Emacs overall. He was referring to Sublime’s specific comparative advantage over Emacs. The relevant advantage here is that Sublime is better at being easy to learn by new users, because it follows conventions used by the OS and by other programs.
- sklogic 11y ago
  Did I miss something and Sublime somehow got some advantage over Emacs? When did it happen and what kind of advantage, exactly?
  - roryokane 11y ago
    Sublime Text’s advantage in this context is the advantage that all GUI text editors share, including Atom and GEdit. This advantage is a combination of being more familiar and having better defaults. Some ways that Sublime is more familiar are that it uses the OS-standard editing hotkeys, such as moving by words with Ctrl-arrows or Option-arrows. It also uses OS-standard terminology, like “close window” instead of “kill buffer” and “paste” instead of “yank”. The result is that new users don’t have to learn anything to be productive – they just edit as if they are in Microsoft Word, while enjoying the programming-specific features of a text editor such as syntax highlighting and block folding. The better defaults include easily creating more than one scratch buffer (just run “New File” multiple times), automatically balancing parens when you type, support for pixel-by-pixel smooth scrolling, and scrollbars that don’t confusingly shrink when you start scrolling past the end of the buffer. I’m sure Emacs supports all these things, but you have to manually configure it to do so first. Many users are scared off from Emacs after seeing that it requires up-front investment to get features that other editors already provide with no work.

ScottBurson 11y ago

Yes, those of us who have been editing Lisp using Paredit-like commands for years [0] may not find that much value here. But I think we're not the target audience; the goal is to help get newcomers over the hump, and that will be a wonderful thing if it works. [0] 35 years, in my case. David Chapman and I implemented balanced-parenthesis editing commands for Zmacs (the Lisp Machine editor) in 1980. To my knowledge, it was the first such implementation for a text editor; the Interlisp structure editor already existed, but was considered hard to use.

mbrock 11y ago
This Chapman, I assume? https://meaningness.wordpress.com/about-david-chapman/ https://meaningness.wordpress.com/about-david-chapman/ I'm something of a fan. This article is great, about his history at MIT's artificial intelligence lab, Ken Wilber, Heidegger, and Buddhism. http://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence http://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artifi...
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  Yep, that's him! Thanks for the links -- I had lost track of him and hadn't seen his blog.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    :) Here he is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/meaningness https://twitter.com/meaningness While sleuthing a bit on Google I realize he was also a contributor to the "UNIX-HATERS handbook." Weirdly, that was really fascinating literature to me as a ... 15 year old, maybe, in like 2004? In my Swedish teenage room full of messed up Linux and OpenBSD boxes, reading everything I could that seemed interesting and intelligent. That handbook, the C2 wiki, various mailing lists, Usenet groups, IRC channels... I attribute a lot of my personality and interests to this nerdy/literate heritage.
    - ScottBurson 11y ago
      Yes. I'm in the UHH too :-) Bottom of p. 211.

Blackthorn 11y ago

This is a huge improvement imo, and something that should be seen as a great advancement in usability. We've gone from needing to use hotkeys (paredit) to not needing to use them and having the machine figure out what you want to do. Maybe others have different opinions, but I find this way of doing things a lot more natural and usable. It's like an old Oblivion mod for archery that asked the question: "Why do other archery mods have a hotkey for denocking your arrow? We just automatically denock if you look at the ground. It just makes sense."

Illotus 11y ago
This. It may not be huge for someone who is accustomed to those hotkeys, but for everyone this is a big deal. Imagine not having to commit those hotkeys to (muscle) memory at all.

danneu 11y ago

If it lets people write lisp with the same ease of writing Javascript or Python (i.e. without investing time learning a tool specifically for editing s-expressions), then that's an advantage over Paredit kinda like Sublime's advantage over Vim/Emacs. Trying it out in Atom, it looks really promising. You just kinda start writing, like on the blank line at the end of a function body, and Parinfer fills in the parens depending on your indentation level in an intuitive fashion, merging your form into the tree above it. In fact, it seems to strictly complement Paredit. Parinfer puts the parens where you want them, and Paredit is there for explicitly editing the tree.

davexunit 11y ago
> kinda like Sublime's advantage over Vim/Emacs. Sublime is trash compared to Emacs.
- roryokane 11y ago
  danneu wasn’t necessarily saying that Sublime is better than Emacs overall. He was referring to Sublime’s specific comparative advantage over Emacs. The relevant advantage here is that Sublime is better at being easy to learn by new users, because it follows conventions used by the OS and by other programs.
sklogic 11y ago
Did I miss something and Sublime somehow got some advantage over Emacs? When did it happen and what kind of advantage, exactly?
- roryokane 11y ago
  Sublime Text’s advantage in this context is the advantage that all GUI text editors share, including Atom and GEdit. This advantage is a combination of being more familiar and having better defaults. Some ways that Sublime is more familiar are that it uses the OS-standard editing hotkeys, such as moving by words with Ctrl-arrows or Option-arrows. It also uses OS-standard terminology, like “close window” instead of “kill buffer” and “paste” instead of “yank”. The result is that new users don’t have to learn anything to be productive – they just edit as if they are in Microsoft Word, while enjoying the programming-specific features of a text editor such as syntax highlighting and block folding. The better defaults include easily creating more than one scratch buffer (just run “New File” multiple times), automatically balancing parens when you type, support for pixel-by-pixel smooth scrolling, and scrollbars that don’t confusingly shrink when you start scrolling past the end of the buffer. I’m sure Emacs supports all these things, but you have to manually configure it to do so first. Many users are scared off from Emacs after seeing that it requires up-front investment to get features that other editors already provide with no work.