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Pretty much the only advantage LT ever had over Emacs was the GUI layer unburdened by decades of development and compatibility with TTYs. In other words, the ho
by klibertp 8y ago
Pretty much the only advantage LT ever had over Emacs was the GUI layer unburdened by decades of development and compatibility with TTYs. In other words, the hope for LT was that it will allow a wide range of scriptable graphical effects. While never explicitly stated, if you read early posts on LT you'll see its feature list is basically 80% Emacs, 10% Smalltalk and 10% eye-candy.
Many (five?) years later, from what I gather, LT has the eye-candy - the rest is perpetually "under construction". It would be hard for it to be anything else, though, as the main developers jumped ship a few years back to work on Eve (which, as a karmic retribution for all my crushed hopes for LT, also tanked and died recently).
Emacs may be less pretty than newer editors, and lots of its APIs are decades old at this point, but it's still the only self-documenting, easily discoverable and extensible editor this side of Pharo and Squeak, which can be used in practice (due to a giant amount of plugins which bring it up to modern standards) for almost any task.
TLDR: LightTable as a powerful editor for programmers is dead - it may be still possible to revive it, but its scope would have to be massively scaled down. It's not going to compete with Emacs & co. anymore, which is a shame, because when it started it had the potential for this.
- pcr910303 8y agoOh, if LT is also advertised as a 'scriptable/extensible' editor that can accomplish 80% of GNU Emacs with eye-candy, that is actually a pretty good advantage... One of the biggest complaint of GNU Emacs (at least for me) is the super bad defaults and esoteric GUI that doesn't mix with other apps because of it's tty-inspired nature... If LT can become a GUI-first Emacs-competent editor, it will be big! :-)
- zimablue 8y agoI'd count being written in a small codebase in clojure and not literally a million lines of e-lisp a big advantage that you haven't mentioned
- lispm 8y agoGNU Emacs isn't written in a million lines of Emacs Lisp. It comes with a library of applications, which has that much lines. The core GNU Emacs is quite a bit less lines of Emacs Lisp.
- zimablue 8y agoThanks for the correction, I didn't know the count was including applications which presumably could be enabled/disabled. Do you have any idea how many lines of elisp/c the core is? And how gnarly it is? I've read some stories.
- lispm 8y agoIt's probably quite substantial, since it runs on several platforms, has a GUI on some, etc. Most of the C code is probably used, but the larger part of the Lisp code is modes (tools, games, apps, ...).
- klibertp 8y agoThe "core" - ie. Elisp code which is preloaded/included in the final 'emacs' executable (as a memory dump of interpreter state) it's less than 80kloc of Elisp. Emacs ships with ~300kloc of "standard" libraries and applications written in Elisp (keep in mind: it's 300kloc of a high-level, fairly expressive, Lispy language - so it translates into a giant pile of features). Further 400-500kloc of Elisp is from add-on packages available via a built-in package manager. Actually, there's more code available, I just counted the plugins I have installed locally. IIRC Emacs' C code numbers ~300kloc and includes both bindings to low-level, systems and GUI functionality, some parts of standard Elisp library (writen in C for performance), as well as Elisp virtual machine, byte-compiler and so on. No JIT yet, but at least there's threading support (take that JS :P). Starting from scratch has many advantages, but it doesn't really work with programs and systems large or complex enough. Otherwise we'd be using a fresh OS every five years instead of working on one of the 5-6 OSes which were all created 30+ years ago.
- lispm 8y agoThanks for the numbers!