Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 420 posts

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#261

Post by [deleted] »

rurban wrote: post #244
dagw wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you will never be as fast or flexible as an F1 car F1 race cars are literally the least flexible cars available. They are designed for exactly one type of racing and there is hardly anything you are allowed to configure the way you want. There are cars with higher top speeds than F1 cars, and cars that accelerate faster. A $2k second hand Honda Civic will beat the crap out of an F1 car around a gravel track. F1 cars…

Having worked in F1 that's entirely wrong. A Honda Civic will not even beat a F1 car in the first gear, which goes up to 180km/h. With an unlimited engine of ~24k rpm and a chassis which sucks around each curve nothing can be compared to a F1. If there are curves. On a straight track there are faster cars for about 4 seconds, but then the F1 overtakes. Our usual estimate was that everything in a F1 car was about 1000…

[deleted]

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#262

Post by dagw »

rurban wrote: post #244
dagw wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you will never be as fast or flexible as an F1 car F1 race cars are literally the least flexible cars available. They are designed for exactly one type of racing and there is hardly anything you are allowed to configure the way you want. There are cars with higher top speeds than F1 cars, and cars that accelerate faster. A $2k second hand Honda Civic will beat the crap out of an F1 car around a gravel track. F1 cars…

Having worked in F1 that's entirely wrong. A Honda Civic will not even beat a F1 car in the first gear, which goes up to 180km/h. With an unlimited engine of ~24k rpm and a chassis which sucks around each curve nothing can be compared to a F1. If there are curves. On a straight track there are faster cars for about 4 seconds, but then the F1 overtakes. Our usual estimate was that everything in a F1 car was about 1000…

Our usual estimate was that everything in a F1 car was about 1000x better than in other cars.

And none of that will matter after the first time you drive over a 6 inch rock

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#264

Post by oblio »

convolvatron wrote: post #235
oblio wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read a bunch of articles where long time Emacs users are put into a position where they have to achieve something on a tight deadline. Many of them try to muddle through their Rube Goldberg contraption of a local config and under time pressure or advised by someone else they try a modern IDE and suddenly realize why many professional developers use them. They realize that despite the potentially subpar text edit…

which is all absolutely fantastic if you are following the script.

The script these days is a lot more flexible than it used to be back in the 90's with Visual Studio.

It's flexible to cover maybe 90-95% of development needs for the main language targeted.

And for those clearly defined use cases, modern IDEs generally fly. Which is far from guaranteed with bespoke configurations (Emacs, Vim).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#265

Post by klodolph »

oblio wrote: post #264
convolvatron wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is all absolutely fantastic if you are following the script.

The script these days is a lot more flexible than it used to be back in the 90's with Visual Studio. It's flexible to cover maybe 90-95% of development needs for the main language targeted. And for those clearly defined use cases, modern IDEs generally fly. Which is far from guaranteed with bespoke configurations (Emacs, Vim).

90-95% of my time is spent working in at least two languages. Usually JavaScript and some backend language, like Go or Python.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#266

Post by heyparkerj »

Azsy wrote: post #189
Arubis wrote: post #119

I understand why there's all this concern about making Emacs popular--as software professionals, we've all seen a few tools that we use and love wither at the vine and die slow deaths. But the concern for _overall_ popularity is a little misplaced. There's more developers than ever, and the pie continues to grow; Emacs just needs a sufficient total userbase to stay maintained, and that seems already to be in place. T…

I was nodding along with the first paragraph. But then, > The greatest threat to Emacs, [..] is a paradigm change in how software gets built or run Is a little to far into scify land. First it requires software to no longer be text based, and then it requires virtually all software to switch to this non-text based solution. In that world a single user can keep Emacs up to date and compatible by asking our AI overlord…

I see where you're going - but I've personally noticed that there are a lot of things coming along with these cloud infrastructure paradigms that have made me feel like my localhost text editing workflows are going to make me look and feel even more like an absolute dinosaur as time goes on. I can't speak eloquently on this as I'm still an amateur to these cloud infra configuration concepts and their real limitations on how I'm used to thinking about application development, but I hope this comment sparks some inspiration for someone else to do so.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#267

Post by alex_smart »

deworms wrote: post #42
underatree wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs has [...] no autocomplete, and doesn't show available functions My impression is that you are not familiar with Emacs.

I have been using emacs for 7 years prior to switching to VS Code. Never looked back. It's better in all regards.

You used emacs for 7 years without learning that it very much has auto-completion, you can see available functions with fuzzy matching, and that you can easily alias any function to any name or key-binding you want instead of memorizing it?

:-O

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#268

Post by klodolph »

throwaway2331 wrote: post #229
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people in this thread talking positively of ELisp (a shameful language even by the low standards set by other Lisp) and who thinks the emacs GUI experience is acceptable in 2021. Some are even arguing that having to write 1000 lines of the previously cited terrible language to get the UX behaviours everyone has been expecting from a text editor in the past three decades is a worthwhile time investment. I wo…

I'm thinking about converting to a modern IDE away from emacs-nox. What can they do that emacs can't?

There's very little that they can do that Emacs can't. It's just that if you're on the easy path, the IDE will give you a pretty high-quality experience with very little time spent configuring it. The "easy path" supports more and more use cases each year, but my experience is still that the more custom your build system is, the more likely it is that you'll not get your nice IDE integrations. That's was true in the 1990s as it is today.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#269

Post by r-zip »

Steltek wrote: post #195
eadmund wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but Javascript is a profoundly terrible language to do anything in, while Lisp is a joy to write in. Being a Lisp machine is core to the value of Emacs. Emacs-without-Lisp is just another editor.

eLisp? Where lexical scoping is this brand new feature that generates compiler warnings? Where the UI thread is the same as your eLisp thread? Where multiprocessing is a super clunky fork-exec with a weird side buffer? Where a simple regular expression works differently between what the user invokes and how you'd write it in a function? Yeah, it's a super joy to write.

As someone who uses Emacs and likes writing lisp, 100% agree. elisp is without a doubt the worst lisp still in common use.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#270

Post by r-zip »

oblio wrote: post #208
krylon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not played with VS Code a lot, but I get the impression that, yes, they aim for something similar. I'm not qualified to judge, though, how successful they are so far. FWIW, when I hear people talk about VS Code, they appear to like it very much. But AFAICT, it has some way to go to catch up with all the functionality emacs has accreted over 30+ years. Also, there is an effort replace the old lisp engine inside…

Isn't the Guile effort practically dead? I remember hearing about it 10 years ago. It was actually started in 2000 and doesn't seem to have progressed since 2014: https://emacsninja.com/posts/state-of-emacs-lisp-on-guile.ht... Plus, even if it's finished, will it get any traction in the ecosystem? Will the ecosystem start moving to it to take advantage of its unique benefits? Who knows? Bonus: Have you heard of GNU H…

Yes, Guile Emacs got abandoned, at least the last time I checked.
Post reply on HN