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Of the “preferred not” languages you listed, Lisp and Lisp-derivatives are easily the most pragmatic languages you will see doing “real” work outside of the scr
by ashton314 2y ago
Of the “preferred not” languages you listed, Lisp and Lisp-derivatives are easily the most pragmatic languages you will see doing “real” work outside of the scripting environment. So, given the dearth of good scriptable editors using other languages, why not give Emacs a try? I will grant that Elisp is a bit of an odd dialect, but a lot of what you learn from learning Elisp will transfer to understanding other languages better, modulo function names and whatnot. It’s also helpful that Elisp has comprehensive documentation available right from the editor itself. There are also hundreds of high-quality examples you can look at too, and Elisp lets to poke at basically every aspect of the editor.
- dwb 2y agoEmacs Lisp is my first Lisp, so I don't even really notice how supposedly weird it is. It's a fine language, don't let it get in your way, and it's just as important to be able to read other's code than it is to write your own. Unless you have all the time in the world, you want to use as much of other people's work as possible. Would I have preferred an editor written in Ruby? Sure. But I think I was right to not worry about that.
- ashton314 2y agoIndeed—most of the weirdness comes from things like dynamic scoping (deprecated, going away, good riddance—most of the packages I use have all switched to using lexical scoping anyway) and function names like `mapcar` instead of just `map`. But that's a trivial matter. Would I write a shell script in Emacs Lisp just for kicks? No. Is it more than good enough to script the crap out of my text editor? Oh yeah. > read other's code I'll second this: there are so many really good packages out there that it makes it easy to find something to get some pointers on how to proceed.