6 ms·

As an Emacs user for ~10 years the greatest deterrent is it being single-threaded and lisp. I just can't understand the love for it. I've spent countless hours

As an Emacs user for ~10 years the greatest deterrent is it being single-threaded and lisp. I just can't understand the love for it. I've spent countless hours customizing my own configuration and I just can't enjoy lisp. Emacs's source code is also hard to understand and contribute to (let's not talk about lisp.h). I'd rather have a new editor (or emacs fully re-written) with the same mindset as emacs - near-full customization via a modern scripting language (lua?) and/or c/cpp plugins, and text-centric. I don't care for fancy UI or buttons it could even have the same look and feel which I love

e40 5y ago
> lisp.h Wow. Been using and extending Emacs for 40 years and I've never had to even look at lisp.h or hack the C code.
- the_spacebyte 5y ago
  That was mostly a "tongue in cheek" joke : ) What I meant was that the code base is overwhelming both because it has some years on top and I don't like/understand lisp that much
gorjusborg 5y ago
That an emacs user holds that opinion is a bit surprising to me, as to me most of the reason for me using emacs is to develop in lisp-inspired languages. I think lisp development is the raison d'etre for emacs in the modern times. As someone who loves fennel, clojure, scheme, etc., I find myself drawn to emacs because the (repl driven) workflow is so good. That said, I've found that I can't give up vi-style modal editing. The interface matters to me. So neovim it is, for now.
- bsder 5y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Lisp is, in fact, an albatross hanging around Emacs neck. Using Lisp (and especially elisp) is not okay. Lisp has some very sharp corners that simply are not acceptable in modern languages. I use Lisp when I'm very resource constrained but still need an interpreted language--otherwise I use anything else. Dynamic scoping is just stupid (fault of elisp). Not being to operate on a sequence is stupid. cons pairs to build everything is stupid. nil() terminated to signify lists is stupid. The pervasive necessity of metaprogramming macros is stupid. An inability to type things is stupid. Lisp/Scheme encased itself in amber in the 1980's and refused to keep up with genuine improvements in programming languages. Sure it meant they missed out on the collective brain damage that was design patterns and object oriented--but it also meant that it missed out on good things, too. Take a very hard look at Clojure and look at what parts of Lisp/Scheme Rich Hickey put a bullet in and which parts he kept. The Lispers still excoriate Clojure as "not a Lisp" and that perfectly sums up the problems with Lisp nowadays.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Sure it meant they missed out on the collective brain damage that was design patterns and object oriented--but it also meant that it missed out on good things, too. The "collective brain damage" and other similarly derogatory epithets that OOP regularly gets slammed with is AIUI actually Java "collective brain damage"; it doesn't necessarily apply to all forms of OOP.
    - bsder 5y ago
      Well, there are two levels to this: 1) It was in fact mostly C++ brain damage. "Design Patterns" predates Java by quite a bit. 2) OOP isn't a unified thing. There was a paper way back that mentioned something like two dozen "characteristics" of "OOP". And then proceeded to point out that "Smalltalk" chooses these, C++ chooses those, Java chooses these, and that there was a lot of disjointed-ness between the definitions.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Yup. So the vaunted "brain damage of OOP" is more a matter of the "brain damage" of C++'s / Java's choice of which of these traits to implement and call the result "OOP". (Personally, I largely agree -- and I say that as a fan of a basically very similar OO language, Object Pascal [as seen in Delphi and Free Pascal / Lazarus], which could also be seen as an imperative language with bolted-on inheritable templates of records with method pointers called classes. It just made a slightly different, and better [IMO], choice of exactly which of these traits to implement, and that makes a all the difference to me.)
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    > Not being to operate on a sequence is stupid. cons pairs to build everything is stupid. There are other sequence types than lists in elisp and pretty much every other lisp out there. And what do you mean with "Not being [able?] to operate on a sequence"? [0] contains a bunch of functions for operating on sequences, and it's notable they don't say list but sequence in their signature. They work on multiple types of sequences, not just lists. I do agree on dynamic scoping by default, that's a major weakness in elisp. [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Sequence-Functions.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Se...
diegocg 5y ago
There is something weird about projects that choose a functional programming language as one of their pillars. When I read nixos documentation, there are constant references to how awesome and pure and functional their language is.
oblio 5y ago
Neovim?
1ark 5y ago
There is a some effort in Nim, called moe[1]. Nim has a lot of features similar to a Lisp, and is both compiled and scriptable. Of course, it requires contributions to make it usable as a daily driver, but I guess that is somewhat the point. The vision is sound imo. 1. https://github.com/fox0430/moe https://github.com/fox0430/moe

e40 5y ago

> lisp.h Wow. Been using and extending Emacs for 40 years and I've never had to even look at lisp.h or hack the C code.

the_spacebyte 5y ago
That was mostly a "tongue in cheek" joke : ) What I meant was that the code base is overwhelming both because it has some years on top and I don't like/understand lisp that much

gorjusborg 5y ago

That an emacs user holds that opinion is a bit surprising to me, as to me most of the reason for me using emacs is to develop in lisp-inspired languages. I think lisp development is the raison d'etre for emacs in the modern times. As someone who loves fennel, clojure, scheme, etc., I find myself drawn to emacs because the (repl driven) workflow is so good. That said, I've found that I can't give up vi-style modal editing. The interface matters to me. So neovim it is, for now.

bsder 5y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Lisp is, in fact, an albatross hanging around Emacs neck. Using Lisp (and especially elisp) is not okay. Lisp has some very sharp corners that simply are not acceptable in modern languages. I use Lisp when I'm very resource constrained but still need an interpreted language--otherwise I use anything else. Dynamic scoping is just stupid (fault of elisp). Not being to operate on a sequence is stupid. cons pairs to build everything is stupid. nil() terminated to signify lists is stupid. The pervasive necessity of metaprogramming macros is stupid. An inability to type things is stupid. Lisp/Scheme encased itself in amber in the 1980's and refused to keep up with genuine improvements in programming languages. Sure it meant they missed out on the collective brain damage that was design patterns and object oriented--but it also meant that it missed out on good things, too. Take a very hard look at Clojure and look at what parts of Lisp/Scheme Rich Hickey put a bullet in and which parts he kept. The Lispers still excoriate Clojure as "not a Lisp" and that perfectly sums up the problems with Lisp nowadays.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Sure it meant they missed out on the collective brain damage that was design patterns and object oriented--but it also meant that it missed out on good things, too. The "collective brain damage" and other similarly derogatory epithets that OOP regularly gets slammed with is AIUI actually Java "collective brain damage"; it doesn't necessarily apply to all forms of OOP.
  - bsder 5y ago
    Well, there are two levels to this: 1) It was in fact mostly C++ brain damage. "Design Patterns" predates Java by quite a bit. 2) OOP isn't a unified thing. There was a paper way back that mentioned something like two dozen "characteristics" of "OOP". And then proceeded to point out that "Smalltalk" chooses these, C++ chooses those, Java chooses these, and that there was a lot of disjointed-ness between the definitions.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Yup. So the vaunted "brain damage of OOP" is more a matter of the "brain damage" of C++'s / Java's choice of which of these traits to implement and call the result "OOP". (Personally, I largely agree -- and I say that as a fan of a basically very similar OO language, Object Pascal [as seen in Delphi and Free Pascal / Lazarus], which could also be seen as an imperative language with bolted-on inheritable templates of records with method pointers called classes. It just made a slightly different, and better [IMO], choice of exactly which of these traits to implement, and that makes a all the difference to me.)
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  > Not being to operate on a sequence is stupid. cons pairs to build everything is stupid. There are other sequence types than lists in elisp and pretty much every other lisp out there. And what do you mean with "Not being [able?] to operate on a sequence"? [0] contains a bunch of functions for operating on sequences, and it's notable they don't say list but sequence in their signature. They work on multiple types of sequences, not just lists. I do agree on dynamic scoping by default, that's a major weakness in elisp. [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Sequence-Functions.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Se...

diegocg 5y ago

There is something weird about projects that choose a functional programming language as one of their pillars. When I read nixos documentation, there are constant references to how awesome and pure and functional their language is.

oblio 5y ago

Neovim?

1ark 5y ago

There is a some effort in Nim, called moe[1]. Nim has a lot of features similar to a Lisp, and is both compiled and scriptable. Of course, it requires contributions to make it usable as a daily driver, but I guess that is somewhat the point. The vision is sound imo. 1. https://github.com/fox0430/moe https://github.com/fox0430/moe