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The problem with your point of view is that if it came to pass, then anyone who wanted to work on Emacs packages would have to learn multiple programming langua
by heintje_ghulam 6y ago
The problem with your point of view is that if it came to pass, then anyone who wanted to work on Emacs packages would have to learn multiple programming languages when before they only needed one, Elisp.
Having packages in multiple languages hurts the ability of people to help contribute to each others' work (especially if they don't have time or space to learn multiple languages).
- erik_seaberg 6y agoThis smacks of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma. If we're afraid that people will want to write packages in Blub for some reason, and we refuse to accommodate Blub at all, we're just driving everyone to some other editor that embraces it.
- heintje_ghulam 6y agoI think the difference is that Emacs isn't a company, and it doesn't need to beat others in a competition, it just needs enough contributors to keep moving forward. Not everyone needs to use Emacs for Emacs to succeed in its goals.
- erik_seaberg 6y agoTrue, I was thinking of http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html (where Lisp was Viaweb's "secret weapon"). And I'm worried about Emacs ending up with too small an audience of package maintainers to cover mainstream workplace use cases.
- nonbirithm 6y agoAgreed, and I was disappointed about xi-editor's approach of using an RPC so any language can be used for extension. For all its issues at least elisp is ubiquitous, and contributes to feature discoverability.