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My Emacs Lisp book is finished

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Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#51

Post by JoelMcCracken »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #49
xrd wrote: post #44

I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly "Writing Emacs Extensions" book years ago. I just never got into the mode of using Elisp on a daily basis and it's faded from memory. I'm excited about this book. And, I really wish there was a book that showed how a developer using a more modern language like JavaScript could use it to customize Emacs. This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powe…

> This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powerful way. This notion that Javascript is superior to (e.g. elisp) because JS is new and elisp is "old" is really irritating. The reasons JS exists has absolutely zero to do with any issues with elisp or lisp or C or haskell or any other programming language. The fact that you know it and do not know elisp is a real thing, but it say…

its such an absurd idea. look at the top contributors for VSCode, and how many of them are employed at Microsoft:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/graphs/contributors

How can you possible separate vscode "winning because of javascript" and "it has development budget X times the budget of Emacs"

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#52

Post by TacticalCoder »

bloopernova wrote: post #37
rvdginste wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer, I find it a bit embarassing that I started using Emacs in 2000, that at some point I even read my email with it, and that I never took the time to really learn emacs-lisp. Still, some day I will. This book might help me. :)

I'm just a devops person, not a coder by any stretch of the imagination, but I found that maintaining my .init.el in git helped me to learn enough elisp to be useful/dangerous. I really dig that it's a full on language used for the configuration files. It just makes so much sense to do it that way. (I also like VSCode's json prefs) Also I love sharing snippets of my .init.el: 40 │ ;; Taken from https://karl-voit.at/2…

> I found that maintaining my .init.el in git helped me to learn enough elisp to be useful/dangerous.

The snippets you gave of your init.el are really basic but I do agree with you: working on init.el (and using Git to revert SNAFUs) helped me learn enough elisp to be dangerous too.

The elisp I write is certainly not idiomatic but it gets the job done. I have some functions I wrote more than a decade ago and they still "Just Work [TM]"!

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#53

Post by edgyquant »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #49
xrd wrote: post #44

I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly "Writing Emacs Extensions" book years ago. I just never got into the mode of using Elisp on a daily basis and it's faded from memory. I'm excited about this book. And, I really wish there was a book that showed how a developer using a more modern language like JavaScript could use it to customize Emacs. This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powe…

> This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powerful way. This notion that Javascript is superior to (e.g. elisp) because JS is new and elisp is "old" is really irritating. The reasons JS exists has absolutely zero to do with any issues with elisp or lisp or C or haskell or any other programming language. The fact that you know it and do not know elisp is a real thing, but it say…

No one said it was superior, but more people know it.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#54

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

edgyquant wrote: post #53
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powerful way. This notion that Javascript is superior to (e.g. elisp) because JS is new and elisp is "old" is really irritating. The reasons JS exists has absolutely zero to do with any issues with elisp or lisp or C or haskell or any other programming language. The fact that you know it and do not know elisp is a real thing, but it say…

No one said it was superior, but more people know it.

The claim was the VSCode is "winning" because it "embraces modern languages". To me that implies at least some kind of superiority.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#55

Post by edgyquant »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #54
edgyquant wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said it was superior, but more people know it.

The claim was the VSCode is "winning" because it "embraces modern languages". To me that implies at least some kind of superiority.

No, it doesn’t, it implies that it uses a language which is widespread and most everyone knows. Languages themselves being superior tends to be an opinion.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#57

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

edgyquant wrote: post #55
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim was the VSCode is "winning" because it "embraces modern languages". To me that implies at least some kind of superiority.

No, it doesn’t, it implies that it uses a language which is widespread and most everyone knows. Languages themselves being superior tends to be an opinion.

> "Most everyone knows".

Pardon my age or something. but if you're a software developer who doesn't work on web-dev, you probably do not know JS, certainly not enough to code much in it.

Maybe "most everyone" leaves enough room to describe all the people who do embedded and native development - I don't know the actual numbers.

But the sentence didn't say: "VSCode is winning because its extension language widespread and most everyone knows it". It said "modern languages". Haskell is a modern language. Rust is a modern language. Lua is a modern language. If VSCode (somehow) used them as its extension language, would it still be winning? Clearly, no.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#58

Post by xrd »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #57
edgyquant wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn’t, it implies that it uses a language which is widespread and most everyone knows. Languages themselves being superior tends to be an opinion.

> "Most everyone knows". Pardon my age or something. but if you're a software developer who doesn't work on web-dev, you probably do not know JS, certainly not enough to code much in it. Maybe "most everyone" leaves enough room to describe all the people who do embedded and native development - I don't know the actual numbers. But the sentence didn't say: "VSCode is winning because its extension language widespread a…

I should have said "modern and more popular languages." For the record, I like elisp/lisp, I just don't use them at my day job and have a hard time customizing emacs with them. Emacs is still my favorite editor, but for my day job, I can get much more done in VSCode because it "embraces" (whatever that means) JS much better than Emacs. I wish it wasn't so, and I'm worried about it long term.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#59

Post by mcguire »

bloopernova wrote: post #35
deworms wrote: post #11

Elisp is a really poor language compared to almost anything else, more work should be done to allow Emacs to be configured in other languages.

Can you give some reasons why you dislike Elisp? What language would you re-write Emacs configurations in?

I believe your second question needs to be rephrased as "What language would you re-write Emacs in?"

I don't remember what the core to elisp fraction is, but it's not that big.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#60

Post by Jtsummers »

mcguire wrote: post #59
bloopernova wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some reasons why you dislike Elisp? What language would you re-write Emacs configurations in?

I believe your second question needs to be rephrased as "What language would you re-write Emacs in?" I don't remember what the core to elisp fraction is, but it's not that big.

Emacs is written in C and Emacs Lisp. I’m not able to download the source right now, but from some googling the C portion is around 20-25%. So 75-80% lisp. That’s a rather substantial amount of code that would need to be rewritten, not to mention that probably does not include all the lisp code that’s not included in the core distribution. Tons of packages out there that would need to be rewritten.

  -----ADDED-----
Downloaded 27.2:

  Emacs Lisp: 1,171,507
  C         :   318,611
  C Headers :    43,738
(that's without comments)

That's a lot of code to replace, and again, just what's in the core distribution.

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