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>>Sounds like your experience was with Emacs Lisp, a very clunky Lisp. Emacs lisp is actually a very practical, easy to use and fun lisp to do a lot of great w
by kamaal 9y ago
>>Sounds like your experience was with Emacs Lisp, a very clunky Lisp.
Emacs lisp is actually a very practical, easy to use and fun lisp to do a lot of great work in.
Richard Matthew Stallman notes:
It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (2). He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
From: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html
Of course if secretaries and regular office people with no prior exposure to programming or STEM education can program Emacs using Emacs Lisp and do useful productive stuff. Programmers most certainly can.
- erikj 9y agoPlease do not conflate MacLisp and Emacs Lisp, they are different languages. GNU Emacs is not directly derived from Multics Emacs, it's one of the many reimplementations of the original Emacs. The closest thing to MacLisp today is actually Common Lisp, and it's much more advanced than Emacs Lisp, which is not surprising considering that Stallman was not interested in creating a state-of-the-art Lisp implementation with his limited resources but wanted to merely provide a minimal foundation for a programmable text editor.
- kamaal 9y agoThanks for mentioning this. I was just trying to point out the fact that its not hard to code in Lisp. Especially given the fact that non-programmers were doing it long back, in an era where there was nothing like Internet available to ask for help.
- kbp 9y ago> The closest thing to MacLisp today is actually Common Lisp I think you could make the argument that Emacs Lisp is as close. Emacs Lisp has some major similarities with Maclisp that CL doesn't share (like in variable scoping and obarrays and such). Elisp and CL are both very close relatives of Maclisp; Elisp was designed as a mini-Maclisp for a text editor, whereas Common Lisp was designed as Maclisp's successor.