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beautiful post. the learning curve for getting into elisp land is steep. we need something like emacs in the future, something to evolve the emacs model as the

beautiful post. the learning curve for getting into elisp land is steep. we need something like emacs in the future, something to evolve the emacs model as the self-evolutionary programmer's environment. the 1M LOC code is much too bloated for the modern age. it should be more tightly integrated with bash/linux/git, and have better exploration methods. i am not sure why nobody is working on this, besides lighttable. perhaps that is the problem with emacs/lisp. finding the valuable stuff out there takes time and is not build around sharing.

progman 13y ago
> the 1M LOC code is much too bloated for the modern age. Why reinvent the wheel? Emacs works well enough, and computers are getting faster every generation. Many editors appeared, they all had the chance to make Emacs obsolete but they ALL failed. Every editor could challenge Emacs but obviously it is not so easy to compete. I use Emacs for decades now because of its extreme stability (almost same version among many operationg systems) and extreme reliability (not a single crash ever). I have tested new editors from time to time but Emacs is still superior. These are some raasons why Emacs is still alive today despite its ancient source code. Another reason is that Emacs depends on Lisp which is much more stable than modern standards like Python, Javascript and HTML5 which change pretty fast and make it difficult to keep big software up to date. For instance, imagine an Emacs like editor written in Python 2. Now the codebase would have to be changed to Python 3, and possibly soon to Python 4. By the way, Haskell provides excellent support for DSLs. So it should be no problem to develop a tool which converts Haskell plugins (or Python or whatever) to Emacs elisp.
- chrisdone 13y ago
  > By the way, Haskell provides excellent support for DSLs. So it should be no problem to develop a tool which converts Haskell plugins (or Python or whatever) to Emacs elisp. I've been thinking about adding Haskell as an additional language for Emacs alongside Elisp. It would be nice to be able to use both.

progman 13y ago

> the 1M LOC code is much too bloated for the modern age. Why reinvent the wheel? Emacs works well enough, and computers are getting faster every generation. Many editors appeared, they all had the chance to make Emacs obsolete but they ALL failed. Every editor could challenge Emacs but obviously it is not so easy to compete. I use Emacs for decades now because of its extreme stability (almost same version among many operationg systems) and extreme reliability (not a single crash ever). I have tested new editors from time to time but Emacs is still superior. These are some raasons why Emacs is still alive today despite its ancient source code. Another reason is that Emacs depends on Lisp which is much more stable than modern standards like Python, Javascript and HTML5 which change pretty fast and make it difficult to keep big software up to date. For instance, imagine an Emacs like editor written in Python 2. Now the codebase would have to be changed to Python 3, and possibly soon to Python 4. By the way, Haskell provides excellent support for DSLs. So it should be no problem to develop a tool which converts Haskell plugins (or Python or whatever) to Emacs elisp.

chrisdone 13y ago
> By the way, Haskell provides excellent support for DSLs. So it should be no problem to develop a tool which converts Haskell plugins (or Python or whatever) to Emacs elisp. I've been thinking about adding Haskell as an additional language for Emacs alongside Elisp. It would be nice to be able to use both.