4 ms·

I’m pretty sure that the primary reason we don’t have more VIM plugins, despite many more emacs users, is vimscript being terrible. If vim had a more usable sc

I’m pretty sure that the primary reason we don’t have more VIM plugins, despite many more emacs users, is vimscript being terrible. If vim had a more usable scripting language it would have easily surpassed emacs in plugins and more importantly, since plugins would have been more popular, vim would have been developed in a way to make it more extensible and nvim wouldn’t even be needed.

coliveira 5y ago
The philosophy of vim is to be able to do a lot without the need for complex plugins, as opposed to emacs' world view. That's why vim script is good only for simple scripting tasks. I think emacs having more plugins is a consequence of its design and philosophy, not the extension language itself. After all, emacs lisp is not the best language in the world and only a small group really knows it beyond the basics.
- iLemming 5y ago
  > emacs lisp is not the best language in the world Emacs-lisp is a Lisp. It may not be the best of Lisps, but even a bad Lisp can be far more powerful than many other non-lispy languages. To understand what makes Emacs so awesome, one has to understand the philosophy of Lisp. Emacs Lisp is not just a text editor, IDE, email client, project management tool, scientific calculator, etc. Emacs, first and foremost is a Lisp environment. Definitely not the most ideal, but certainly the best one we have today. > I think emacs having more plugins is a consequence of its design and philosophy, not the extension language itself I believe, Emacs held the crown of "the most malleable" tool for over forty years, specifically because it builds on top of Lisp. Number of plugins is not an indicator. They also have to "play nicely" with each other. I just checked - I pull over four hundred Emacs packages in my config, including built-ins and dependency libs. I just cannot imagine any other IDE or text editor with 400 plugins installed. That's just not possible.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    Emacs lisp is not a bad language, but it's also not the reason for the existence of Emacs. It is the other way around: it was Emacs that created Emacs lisp. Initially, emacs was created on top of TECO, arguably the worst, most difficult programmable editor ever created. TECO language was so bad that they decided to switch. But emacs, the editor, was successful even running on top of a terrible language that nobody liked at the time.
    - iLemming 5y ago
      > Emacs lisp is not a bad language, but it's also not the reason for the existence of Emacs Early Emacs and the modern GNU/Emacs I think, are two distinct worlds. I believe Lisp has shaped Emacs into its modern form. I just can't imagine the possibility of building something like Org-mode, with the same level of extensibility and flexibility in any other language that is not a Lisp. I bet if you ask any serious Emacsen - authors and maintainers of Magit, CIDER, or any other serious Emacs package if they could replicate their work, for example, in Python. I have no doubts, they'd definitely say: "that's nearly impossible"
      - coliveira 5y ago
        Funny, because Magit has been ported to Vim, I use it daily.
        iLemming 5y ago
        Magit is not just a user interface. It's also a number of emacs-lisp packages useful on their own. It's Transient that's gaining popularity for building modal key UIs in Emacs. It's Forge that paved the road for nice packages like github.com/anticomputer/gh-notify. It is Org-mode integration and many other things. What you're using is a ported subset of them.
        coliveira 5y ago
        So much better, because what I want is to interact with git, not to manage a hodge podge of libraries.
jrop 5y ago
I think you are correct. I think this is why certain Vim "demigods" have arisen (aka tpope). Only a few take the time to learn VimScript. In my humble opinion, when I took the time to try and learn it a while back, I ascertained that it was not worth my time. Having never written a line of Lua in my life, on the other hand, I was able to pick it up in exponentially less time than the small bit of VimScript that I "know". Lua is not a fantastic language, but it is infinitely better than VimScript.

coliveira 5y ago

The philosophy of vim is to be able to do a lot without the need for complex plugins, as opposed to emacs' world view. That's why vim script is good only for simple scripting tasks. I think emacs having more plugins is a consequence of its design and philosophy, not the extension language itself. After all, emacs lisp is not the best language in the world and only a small group really knows it beyond the basics.

iLemming 5y ago
> emacs lisp is not the best language in the world Emacs-lisp is a Lisp. It may not be the best of Lisps, but even a bad Lisp can be far more powerful than many other non-lispy languages. To understand what makes Emacs so awesome, one has to understand the philosophy of Lisp. Emacs Lisp is not just a text editor, IDE, email client, project management tool, scientific calculator, etc. Emacs, first and foremost is a Lisp environment. Definitely not the most ideal, but certainly the best one we have today. > I think emacs having more plugins is a consequence of its design and philosophy, not the extension language itself I believe, Emacs held the crown of "the most malleable" tool for over forty years, specifically because it builds on top of Lisp. Number of plugins is not an indicator. They also have to "play nicely" with each other. I just checked - I pull over four hundred Emacs packages in my config, including built-ins and dependency libs. I just cannot imagine any other IDE or text editor with 400 plugins installed. That's just not possible.
- coliveira 5y ago
  Emacs lisp is not a bad language, but it's also not the reason for the existence of Emacs. It is the other way around: it was Emacs that created Emacs lisp. Initially, emacs was created on top of TECO, arguably the worst, most difficult programmable editor ever created. TECO language was so bad that they decided to switch. But emacs, the editor, was successful even running on top of a terrible language that nobody liked at the time.
  - iLemming 5y ago
    > Emacs lisp is not a bad language, but it's also not the reason for the existence of Emacs Early Emacs and the modern GNU/Emacs I think, are two distinct worlds. I believe Lisp has shaped Emacs into its modern form. I just can't imagine the possibility of building something like Org-mode, with the same level of extensibility and flexibility in any other language that is not a Lisp. I bet if you ask any serious Emacsen - authors and maintainers of Magit, CIDER, or any other serious Emacs package if they could replicate their work, for example, in Python. I have no doubts, they'd definitely say: "that's nearly impossible"
    - coliveira 5y ago
      Funny, because Magit has been ported to Vim, I use it daily.
      - iLemming 5y ago
        Magit is not just a user interface. It's also a number of emacs-lisp packages useful on their own. It's Transient that's gaining popularity for building modal key UIs in Emacs. It's Forge that paved the road for nice packages like github.com/anticomputer/gh-notify. It is Org-mode integration and many other things. What you're using is a ported subset of them.
        coliveira 5y ago
        So much better, because what I want is to interact with git, not to manage a hodge podge of libraries.

jrop 5y ago

I think you are correct. I think this is why certain Vim "demigods" have arisen (aka tpope). Only a few take the time to learn VimScript. In my humble opinion, when I took the time to try and learn it a while back, I ascertained that it was not worth my time. Having never written a line of Lua in my life, on the other hand, I was able to pick it up in exponentially less time than the small bit of VimScript that I "know". Lua is not a fantastic language, but it is infinitely better than VimScript.