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Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

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Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#41

Post by someguy101010 »

foobarian wrote: post #27
podiki wrote: post #23

As an Emacs and Lisp lover, the description of text-based tools and the power of using text to me just screams why something like Lisp is so powerful: homoiconicity. (And at least one big difference for elisp compared to Bash.) To quote Wikipedia [0] for anyone unfamiliar with the term, as I was until learning some Lisp: "A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the languag…

I've been hearing the "code is data" mantra often, but the reason I never thought this was a desirable property is that it seems trivial to define any number of languages as their own AST. But there is a good reason that we don't program by writing out ASTs - it's relatively hard to read and manipulate. Does the Lisp implementation just happen to be particularly readable?

The ast of a lisp program is essentially the same as the code of lisp itself. There is no intermediary step. Practically I'm sure there is, but conceptually that is they way it behaves.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#42

Post by joseph »

koz_ wrote: post #32
jolux wrote: post #6

I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code, which is vastly more popular. I think what made VSCode popular was the availability of many high-quality extensions for major languages. Unfortunately, my experience with Elisp packages is that they tend to be much less stable. This is changing some with LSP mode, of course, but I think the Emacs community would do well…

I agree that VS Code is easier to edit code in, but Emacs is easier to program and extend. Ease of use simply isn't why people use Emacs and I think that at this point it would be hard for it to ever compete with VS Code on that front. VS Code is like the Java of text editors. It relies on a universally understood and accepted model of editing text (non-modal, leveraging the mouse heavily), one that is familiar to al…

> I agree that VS Code is easier to edit code in, but Emacs is easier to program and extend. Ease of use simply isn't why people use Emacs and I think that at this point it would be hard for it to ever compete with VS Code on that front.

I don't program in Emacs except to fix bugs or make small modifications to my init.el. I use Emacs because it's the easiest editor to use. The keybindings are ubiquitous: they are standard in the command line of bash and other shells as well as numerous other programs, and all throughout the macOS GUI. By sticking to Emacs as an editor I am using the most widely available keybindings anywhere and that helps me be productive in a multitude of places. Emacs has modes for all the languages I use, and especially now with LSP, they generally Just Work. I start Emacs as a server when I log in, and I can connect to it from any shell on the same machine, and my open files are there waiting for me. I guess you might find VS Code better if you like the mouse, but I don't want my hands to leave the keyboard while editing as I find it counterproductive.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#43

Post by jonnycomputer »

Sometimes I think people trick themselves into thinking that all their fiddling with Emacs counts as part of their productivity.

Don't hate on me. I use Emacs just about every day. I used to use Emacs as my go to editor for writing code ... and it almost worked. But it was never hassle free, and things often worked more poorly than I would have liked, or ended up requiring too much fiddling to get it to work right, or packages were inadequately maintained. So now, I tend to use it for quick, short code writes, especially when I'm remoted in to a server. I also use it for org-mode, and for writing my book.

Now I use Pycharm for python and web development for things that can reasonably be called a "project"; the level of language support, introspection, and intelligent code prediction exceeds anything I ever achieved in Emacs.

I use VSCode for quick scripts, and for when I need to do maintenance work on some old php code. I like it fine. It fits in this really nice place between a full IDE and a bare bones text editor like Notepad or even BBEdit (ha!).

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#44

Post by jonnycomputer »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #2

This is pretty tangential, but I don't understand why there isn't a roguelike framework available for Emacs. It seems like the perfect roguelike platform for playtesting and hacking on and would on-board a lot of new people into the Emacsen ecology without any real difficulty. The standard roguelike library libtocd has bindings for every other language--why not elisp?

I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago as well.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#45

Post by soraminazuki »

jolux wrote: post #6

I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code, which is vastly more popular. I think what made VSCode popular was the availability of many high-quality extensions for major languages. Unfortunately, my experience with Elisp packages is that they tend to be much less stable. This is changing some with LSP mode, of course, but I think the Emacs community would do well…

From what I can tell, the relative instability of Emacs comes from two things: the lack of well-supported concurrency primitives and defadvice. The former is the source of UI lockups, and if you're really out of luck, you'd have no other choice but to kill the Emacs process. The latter is a footgun in Elisp that allows you to replace or hook into any function defined in Emacs.

I think the concurrency problem is solvable given tremendous time and effort. However, I doubt there is anything that could be done about defadvice. For all its shortcomings, defadvice is a defining feature of Emacs that makes it more extensible than any of the competition.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#46

Post by konjin »

foobarian wrote: post #27
podiki wrote: post #23

As an Emacs and Lisp lover, the description of text-based tools and the power of using text to me just screams why something like Lisp is so powerful: homoiconicity. (And at least one big difference for elisp compared to Bash.) To quote Wikipedia [0] for anyone unfamiliar with the term, as I was until learning some Lisp: "A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the languag…

I've been hearing the "code is data" mantra often, but the reason I never thought this was a desirable property is that it seems trivial to define any number of languages as their own AST. But there is a good reason that we don't program by writing out ASTs - it's relatively hard to read and manipulate. Does the Lisp implementation just happen to be particularly readable?

The AST and the parse tree are basically the same. You only need to rename the bracket nodes to their first element.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#47

Post by jonnycomputer »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #43

Sometimes I think people trick themselves into thinking that all their fiddling with Emacs counts as part of their productivity. Don't hate on me. I use Emacs just about every day. I used to use Emacs as my go to editor for writing code ... and it almost worked. But it was never hassle free, and things often worked more poorly than I would have liked, or ended up requiring too much fiddling to get it to work right, o…

Don't get me wrong, a lot of these problems aren't really Emacs's fault. Jetbrains puts a lot of money and effort into its IDEs. If some commercial or nonprofit entity was actually committed to developing and maintaining elisp packages providing superb language support, then Emacs would have it.

Maybe language support will get better with LSP; anyone know how that is going in the emacs world?

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#48

Post by samus »

foobarian wrote: post #27
podiki wrote: post #23

As an Emacs and Lisp lover, the description of text-based tools and the power of using text to me just screams why something like Lisp is so powerful: homoiconicity. (And at least one big difference for elisp compared to Bash.) To quote Wikipedia [0] for anyone unfamiliar with the term, as I was until learning some Lisp: "A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the languag…

I've been hearing the "code is data" mantra often, but the reason I never thought this was a desirable property is that it seems trivial to define any number of languages as their own AST. But there is a good reason that we don't program by writing out ASTs - it's relatively hard to read and manipulate. Does the Lisp implementation just happen to be particularly readable?

LISP syntax is a data format. Unlike JSON though, its only structured data type is linked lists. `(a . b)` represents a linked list node (a pair or a `cons`) with the symbol `a` as first element and `b` as the second. The syntax `(a b c)` is a shorthand for `(a . (b . (c . nil)))`, with `nil` representing the empty list. It is commonplace to define what we nowadays call embedded DSLs using macros, which are just functions that manipulate LISP data structures before the interpreter evaluates them.

It is the first dynamic programming language, and arguably the most dynamic one. The only other non-esoteric language that comes close is PL/I, which also had macros and where every keyword could be redefined. But its standard is ungodly long, while Scheme dialects can be descriped in a few tens of pages. Also, it is quite easy to write an interpreter for core LISP: 100 to 200 lines, depending on your desire for readability.

Edit: Yes, this means there are lots of parentheses, which can be hard to read.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#49

Post by karlicoss »

foobarian wrote: post #27
podiki wrote: post #23

As an Emacs and Lisp lover, the description of text-based tools and the power of using text to me just screams why something like Lisp is so powerful: homoiconicity. (And at least one big difference for elisp compared to Bash.) To quote Wikipedia [0] for anyone unfamiliar with the term, as I was until learning some Lisp: "A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the languag…

I've been hearing the "code is data" mantra often, but the reason I never thought this was a desirable property is that it seems trivial to define any number of languages as their own AST. But there is a good reason that we don't program by writing out ASTs - it's relatively hard to read and manipulate. Does the Lisp implementation just happen to be particularly readable?

It is quite a bit more readable comparing (for example) to what you'd do in Python, basically a matter of few extra quotes. Here's an example https://github.com/magnars/dash.el/blob/a17b6b5409825891423b...

Another benefit apart from macros is that you can replace whole subexpressions to modify the function code: https://github.com/raxod502/el-patch#el-patch Although arguably you can achieve the same with source code and other languages: https://github.com/adamchainz/patchy#patchy

Although (as a keen Emacs user & someone who often hacks into existing librairies) user I'm not really convinced either that homoiconicity plays that huge of a role in Emacs malleability in particular -- to me it's more about hooks/advice system and being able to dynamically override things to tweak into the way I want them to behave -- and I don't see a good reason why this couldn't be possible in other languages.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#50

Post by podiki »

foobarian wrote: post #27
podiki wrote: post #23

As an Emacs and Lisp lover, the description of text-based tools and the power of using text to me just screams why something like Lisp is so powerful: homoiconicity. (And at least one big difference for elisp compared to Bash.) To quote Wikipedia [0] for anyone unfamiliar with the term, as I was until learning some Lisp: "A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the languag…

I've been hearing the "code is data" mantra often, but the reason I never thought this was a desirable property is that it seems trivial to define any number of languages as their own AST. But there is a good reason that we don't program by writing out ASTs - it's relatively hard to read and manipulate. Does the Lisp implementation just happen to be particularly readable?

In addition to the other replies, I think it always takes time to learn a new language and its syntax, preferred formatting, etc. So I don't know what is more "natural," as that would depend on your background, but once I learned s-expressions it is my favorite way to read code. (Combine that with Emacs to handle all formatting, parens matching, and so on, and you can just think about code rather than decipher it too.)
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