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>Why is it so difficult for languages in these families to integrate with other editors? ..because of the Lisp syntax i.e. parentheses soup, which is hostile t
by copx 2y ago
>Why is it so difficult for languages in these families to integrate with other editors?
..because of the Lisp syntax i.e. parentheses soup, which is hostile to normal, textual editing, and requires advanced structural editing instead.
They are other options than EMACS for that, though. The article mentions DrRacket, you yourself figured out that you can configure a vim-style editor to do it.
But one way or the other, you either love it or hate it. Smalltalk has the same issue, the language was not designed to work with a regular text editor, you are expected to use an object-oriented, mouse-based GUI to work on a live "image", as opposed to editing static text.
Such peculiarities are a major hurdle to adoption, but ultimately an essential aspect of the development philosophies of these languages.
- ab5tract 2y agoI didn’t set up any advanced structural editing in neovim and I don’t recall any such features existing in DrRacket’s editor. The only reason, as I understand it, for using Emacs is this much vaunted ability to evaluate expressions in the editor that are run by a running interpreter process. It was cool to experience but hardly earth shattering or a decent reason to learn the forest of chords, modes, and metas of Emacs… And as far as I could tell, it was just about sending some text to the interpreter via a pipe. It doesn’t seem like something that should require a brand new editor or a complex, custom configuration of an existing one to accomplish.