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To be fair, the part of Emacs implemented in Lisp looks nothing like poetry. I wouldn't qualify it as ``utter crap'' but it's a lot messier than I thought. So
by l0stman 17y ago
To be fair, the part of Emacs implemented in Lisp looks nothing like poetry. I wouldn't qualify it as ``utter crap'' but it's a lot messier than I thought. Some of the default packages looks like straight C code translated verbatim to Lisp.
My take is that even if it's easier to screw things up in C, that doesn't mean that if you program in a higher level language, you'd automatically produce elegant code.
- eru 17y agoEmacs Lisp is a mess. It doesn't even have lexical scoping.
- jrockway 17y agoThe development version does. I can tell you, though, that this doesn't really matter in real life. The compiler warns you when you use a free variable, so it's pretty hard to accidentally misuse a dynamic variable. There are pathological cases that people point out, but these rarely matter in elisp that most people actually write. Programming Emacs is a little different from programming other systems, but once you use its idioms instead of the ones you took from your favorite language, everything works quite nicely.
- eru 17y agoOh, it's not so much a problem of using a free variable by accident--where the compiler can help you out--but of not being able to use proper closures. I agree that emacs lisp can still be used to productively write software. People put up with much worse things.