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Emacs Is a Lispboard

en.andros.dev

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Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#41

Post by conartist6 »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #34
conartist6 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose the JS ecosystem. Why does the power of Emacs not belong in the browser? These days JS is a powerful enough FP language to do it.

No, the power of the browser belongs in emacs. You're composing the wrong direction! Anyway aren't you just describing vscode?

I think I'm composing in the right direction! Terminal protocols are 50 years old, have some wild backwards incompatibilities, and are not accessibility-friendly. Funny enough CSTML functions both like a terminal protocol and like a replacement for HTML and XML

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#42

Post by conartist6 »

taeric wrote: post #39
conartist6 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ES6 was released 16 years ago. I'm building on top of ES6 like it's rock solid, and so far I haven't been disappointed. After ES6 the langdev process changed materially, and it now rewards introducing language features that are, in my view, half-baked. I have had to take over parts of the work of the standards committee to be able to do this project at all. I had to reinvent iteration to get both perf and abstraction…

Right, but that about halves the age of JavaScript as noted in this thread. I fully agree that it is reaching a more stable place now than it was 5 or 10 years ago. It is still nowhere near as old as elisp.

Oh for sure. I'm not trying to make a case against Emacs or Elisp or anything. Mature tech is highly, highly valuable. I just wanted to know if JS could do it. Could it, can it host a whole unix-y, emacs-y OS?

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#43

Post by slowmovintarget »

hatsumisen wrote: post #40

Can someone define "lispboard" for me? The article calls the browser a lispboard, which breaks every guess at a definition I have.

The author defines it:

> Like an electronics breadboard, a board where every module you plug in shares a bus with all the others, except here the modules are written in Lisp.

The bit about the browser seems to simply be a strained metaphor: "The browser is a rented Lispboard, with a landlord. Emacs is the only one you can own."

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#44

Post by hatsumisen »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #43
hatsumisen wrote: post #40

Can someone define "lispboard" for me? The article calls the browser a lispboard, which breaks every guess at a definition I have.

The author defines it: > Like an electronics breadboard, a board where every module you plug in shares a bus with all the others, except here the modules are written in Lisp. The bit about the browser seems to simply be a strained metaphor: "The browser is a rented Lispboard, with a landlord. Emacs is the only one you can own."

Thanks! I missed that.

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#45

Post by kubb »

conartist6 wrote: post #25
iLemming wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you need Lisp. That's the actual "power of Emacs". Emacs is a Lisp-interpreter with a built-in text editor. Everything stems from that. Anyone challenging "the choice" of Lisp as the configuration language for an editor, saying things like: "Why? If X is better - faster, more modern, more popular...", etc., have misunderstanding of what makes Lisp so uniquely powerful. A specific language is not the point - t…

> to implement anything similar to Emacs, you'd need a homoiconic language I've got that. It took 6 years but I developed a comprehensive homoiconic layer for Javascript

How does that work? Homoiconicity is a property of the language, not something you can develop as a layer.

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#46

Post by veqq »

conartist6 wrote: post #37
crabbone wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The JS code won't be able to modify the browser itself, but neither can ELisp modify the actual Emacs binary code. You misunderstood the problem. Remember when Firefox' GUI was made of XUL and that was indeed accessible from JavaScript (before they abandoned add-ons in favor of Google's extensions). Then you had add-ons like Firebug or KeySnail that could indeed take control of the browser's "chrome" (i.e. the visu…

Wait, so what is the problem? For me the biggest problem is that CSRF makes it unnecessarily difficult to write a "browser within a browser", which would otherwise not be all that hard

> so what is the problem?

That browsers/web tech is moving in the opposite way and blocking various emacs-esque usecases.

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#47

Post by cmrdporcupine »

iLemming wrote: post #21
xvilka wrote: post #3

Something like Lem[1][2] could go even further because of the richer CommonLisp ecosystem compared to Elisp one. [1] https://lem-project.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/lem-project/lem

What do you mean by "richer ecosystem"? Have you ever seen GitHub language stats - there's so much Elisp on GitHub alone, it's absolute bananas. The amount of Elisp in the wild probably surpasses the amount of Clojure, CL and Racket combined. And mind that it isn't "a general use" PL - it exists for one and single purpose. Lem is great and I'm happy there's finally something out there to challenge Emacs' hegemony, ye…

Lem already has a clone of legit. And there's org-mode-alikes, as well.

There's very little I miss when I use lem, TBH.

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#48

Post by cmrdporcupine »

adrian_b wrote: post #7
xvilka wrote: post #3

Something like Lem[1][2] could go even further because of the richer CommonLisp ecosystem compared to Elisp one. [1] https://lem-project.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/lem-project/lem

Having CommonLisp as the extension language would indeed be a great improvement over Elisp. However, I am suspicious about the dependency of Lem on Webkit, which for me is rather associated with inefficiency and low performance than with the instant reactions that I expect from programming text editors, terminal emulators and tiled window managers. The main problem is that it is very difficult for any replacement of…

The WebKit UI is actually snappier and more performant than the previous SDL2 one.

I don't think WebKit is slow at all. Browser bloat around it often is.

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#49

Post by veqq »

stackghost wrote: post #14
xvilka wrote: post #3

Something like Lem[1][2] could go even further because of the richer CommonLisp ecosystem compared to Elisp one. [1] https://lem-project.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/lem-project/lem

"Common Lisp Emacs" has been attempted a few times. Lem seems like the best effort yet, and I was really excited about it until they decided to adopt a webview renderer. I've got vscode for that.

It supports ncurses too. And if someone else wanted to maintain the SDL2 version or such, they'd be happy. The issue's just a lack of engineering effort and more people complaining than assisting. :/

Re: Emacs Is a Lispboard

#50

Post by conartist6 »

kubb wrote: post #45
conartist6 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to implement anything similar to Emacs, you'd need a homoiconic language I've got that. It took 6 years but I developed a comprehensive homoiconic layer for Javascript

How does that work? Homoiconicity is a property of the language, not something you can develop as a layer.

JS was already pretty close. Babel allows a fantastic degree of power in code transformation, it just doesn't preserve blank space.

If I were to use my preferred terminology I would simply call these transform-your-own-code formats "embeddings", and there can be many embeddings for a single language.

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