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> you have to learn an old and obscure LISP dialect for it As someone who is glancingly familiar with emacs (I have only ever written one elisp function, that

> you have to learn an old and obscure LISP dialect for it As someone who is glancingly familiar with emacs (I have only ever written one elisp function, that too with help) it's a really stupid question, but couldn't emacs have bindings for lua or python or something? That would increase the number of people who can program for it and customize it. > in 20 years from now Emacs will still be around I think the real risk for emacs is, over the years, slowly losing the pool of people who care enough to contribute to it -- not just core developers, but also people who write packages, themes, etc. I already see a lot of developers who think Atom / VSCode / Sublime Text is "good enough". You may choose to discount Sublime because it's closed source (I do despite loving it otherwise), but VSCode and Atom are open-source and browser technology is only going to get better.

chaoky 9y ago
Elisp would still a better much better language than python or Ruby (for emacs), especially now that lexical binding is becoming standard. Emacs people would like to move to scheme, if anything. (even RMS wishes emacs would move to scheme.)
dleslie 9y ago
Emacs is a lisp; there's a very small and tiny layer of C at the bottom and everything else is a tower of lisp. You can interact with it with other languages, via many different means, but in the process you lose the joy and power of working in a live lisp environment.
- noch 9y ago
  > there's a very small and tiny layer of C at the bottom [...] That layer of C is hardly "tiny." Everything from font drivers to process management to a lisp interpreter to window and buffer code, to overlays, and a lot more.
  - dleslie 9y ago
    There's 1,262,537 lines of elisp in 25.3, compared to 291,203 lines of C and C headers. While there is a fair amount of C code to do what you mentioned, much of the C is definitions for the core lisp language with 1,483 DEFUN statements in it. But yah, not tiny, sure. I'm looking forward to it being replaced via the REmacs project. https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs
vrotaru 9y ago
> but couldn't emacs have bindings for lua or python or something? It can, and here is an example: https://blag.bcc32.com/ecaml-getting-started/2017/11/05/emacs-plugins-in-ocaml-1/ https://blag.bcc32.com/ecaml-getting-started/2017/11/05/emac... And here is a better link I guess: http://diobla.info/blog-archive/modules-tut.html http://diobla.info/blog-archive/modules-tut.html
pvdebbe 9y ago
But there is an Emacs clone with JS bindings, and it's called Atom.

chaoky 9y ago

Elisp would still a better much better language than python or Ruby (for emacs), especially now that lexical binding is becoming standard. Emacs people would like to move to scheme, if anything. (even RMS wishes emacs would move to scheme.)

dleslie 9y ago

Emacs is a lisp; there's a very small and tiny layer of C at the bottom and everything else is a tower of lisp. You can interact with it with other languages, via many different means, but in the process you lose the joy and power of working in a live lisp environment.

noch 9y ago
> there's a very small and tiny layer of C at the bottom [...] That layer of C is hardly "tiny." Everything from font drivers to process management to a lisp interpreter to window and buffer code, to overlays, and a lot more.
- dleslie 9y ago
  There's 1,262,537 lines of elisp in 25.3, compared to 291,203 lines of C and C headers. While there is a fair amount of C code to do what you mentioned, much of the C is definitions for the core lisp language with 1,483 DEFUN statements in it. But yah, not tiny, sure. I'm looking forward to it being replaced via the REmacs project. https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs

vrotaru 9y ago

> but couldn't emacs have bindings for lua or python or something? It can, and here is an example: https://blag.bcc32.com/ecaml-getting-started/2017/11/05/emacs-plugins-in-ocaml-1/ https://blag.bcc32.com/ecaml-getting-started/2017/11/05/emac... And here is a better link I guess: http://diobla.info/blog-archive/modules-tut.html http://diobla.info/blog-archive/modules-tut.html

pvdebbe 9y ago

But there is an Emacs clone with JS bindings, and it's called Atom.