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Emacs is Dead (2010)

tkf.github.io

31–40 of 115 posts

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#31
post #20

This article's "philosophy of Emacs" runs counter to the conventional wisdom that "Emacs is a good operating system, it just needs a decent text editor". If anything what the author describes is a "philosophy of Acme" -- do as much as possible by piping in and out of external processes. While Emacs can do this, there is no guiding principle to favor it over elisp extensions. I think the philosophy of Emacs, if it has…

> the wisdom that "Emacs is a good operating system, it just needs a decent text editor".

that's not wisdom; that's a sarcastic quip by the vim side of the emacs-vim/vim-emacs religious war.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#32
post #29

"js2-mode is developed by an eccentric developer called Steve Yegge" I think the translator didn't get it right when he/she called Steve Yegge "Eccentric." Google translate makes no mention of this, while Bing describes js2-mode as "unusual, which makes more sense: "js2-mode new JavaScript for measure mode made by Developer Steve Yegge is somewhat unusual, as implemented in Emacs Lisp"

Actually, the phrase used in the original document, 少し変わった開発者, clearly referes to Yegge as being "a bit unusual developer".

I stand corrected.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#33
post #27
post #5

I don't believe that Emacs is dead at all. Actually, most of the problems (multithreading, libraries, file I/O) raised by this article can be solved by replacing Emacs Lisp backend with Guile, which is an active and promising project [1,2]. As for Emacs philosophy, it might even survive Emacs (in the hypothetical situation where Emacs dies) if a project such as Emacsy (the second one presented in [1]) takes off. [1]…

Replacing Emacs Lisp with Guile has been active and promising for about a decade. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1663627/guile-and-emacs I still use emacs a lot but these days I use IntelliJ for Java and Sublime Text for a lot of my other editing.

I'm not sure about you, but the level of effort required to keep my emacs.d up to date and the level of effort required for each project has turned me away from emacs as my main development environment.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#34
The article is extremely poorly translated, and many of the sentences don't make sense. This makes it hard for me to figure out if something was lost in translation or if the author is as ignorant as the translation makes him out to be.

I won't go through the post line by line; I think this paragraph sufficiently establishes that the author is ignorant.

> The virtue of Unix convention of making a big thing by combining small things is inherited in Emacs. This virtue itself is the reason why I am using Emacs. However, this may be becoming history. What is the meaning of the world without the virtue or philosophy, but with only benefit? I’d be disappointed if Emacs become so.

The precursors of Emacs were written at the AI lab at MIT, which at the time ran the ITS operating system. ITS had values that were pretty much orthogonal to Unix, which makes the statement especially ignorant. GNU Emacs's first public release in the 80s had to be ported to Unix to make it work.

Emacs is famous for being very extensible and can be used as a web browser, newsreader, spreadsheet, etc. You can do almost anything and never leave the Emacs environment. This is the opposite of combining many small programs to create something big.

Emacs also has a clear and logical design, and allows you redefine almost anything you don't like. Unix is famous for having a horrendous, incoherent design that is so poor that many of its commands are digestive noises (nroff, fsck, awk, grep). Its other commands are cryptically named and for years and years the documentation was nonexistent or terrible.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get towards the bottom of the article, it actually says that this is a strength of emacs, and not a weakness. The claim is that the weak lisp interpreter encourages work to be done in other processes (reference to the awesome Tramp), thus making the feature available to other editors (Vim, TextMate), and the shell. The author compares this philosophy to Eclipse's where everything is a Java plugin written jus…

The awesome Tramp, is it? IMHO, of all the software on my hard drive that I use regularly, Tramp is the most likely to break or hiccup in a novel or unfathomable way. It does fill a need or 3, I must admit, and I hate to be negative, but if that is the best example you can come up with of the positive effects of putting Emacs functionality in external programs, that makes me lean towards the conclusion that it is a b…

Some awesome Emacs Lisp programs that relies on external programs:

mu4e: http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

not much: http://notmuchmail.org/

EDBI: https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-edbi

ropemacs: http://rope.sourceforge.net/ropemacs.html

RSense: http://cx4a.org/software/rsense/index.html

GCCSense: http://cx4a.org/software/gccsense/index.html

emacs-ipython-notebook: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook

emacs-jedi: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-jedi

request.el: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-request/

Well, the last three is my projects so you could exclude that :)

Also, we could add version conrolling interfaces such as magit and VC (relying on git/svn/hg/...) and advanced interpreter such as SLIME/nrepl.el/geiser.

Ah, and don't forget dired!

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#36

TKF is an awesome (world class?) python and emacs/elisp developer. His projects have helped tune my emacs into a decently powerful python development vehicle. However, the level of effort required to get the basic functionality of a modern IDE like Pycharm has been daunting and required hours upon hours of fiddling.

Will you post links to some of these packages? I'm building up my Emacs Python toolkit after many years of being a Vim user (with liberal use of Evil mode of course! :-)

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#37
post #31
post #20

This article's "philosophy of Emacs" runs counter to the conventional wisdom that "Emacs is a good operating system, it just needs a decent text editor". If anything what the author describes is a "philosophy of Acme" -- do as much as possible by piping in and out of external processes. While Emacs can do this, there is no guiding principle to favor it over elisp extensions. I think the philosophy of Emacs, if it has…

> the wisdom that "Emacs is a good operating system, it just needs a decent text editor". that's not wisdom; that's a sarcastic quip by the vim side of the emacs-vim/vim-emacs religious war.

Sorry, I meant to say "conventional wisdom".

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing Emacs Lisp with Guile has been active and promising for about a decade. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1663627/guile-and-emacs I still use emacs a lot but these days I use IntelliJ for Java and Sublime Text for a lot of my other editing.

I'm not sure about you, but the level of effort required to keep my emacs.d up to date and the level of effort required for each project has turned me away from emacs as my main development environment.

How much effort do you have to put in to keep your .emacs.d up to date ?

I only started using emacs in emacs 22, so I haven't had to keep things working for 5-10 major releases like I'm sure some people have, but my init.el and .emacs.d have been pretty static the whole time.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing Emacs Lisp with Guile has been active and promising for about a decade. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1663627/guile-and-emacs I still use emacs a lot but these days I use IntelliJ for Java and Sublime Text for a lot of my other editing.

I'm not sure about you, but the level of effort required to keep my emacs.d up to date and the level of effort required for each project has turned me away from emacs as my main development environment.

Same with vim, if you add every fantastic and absolutely necessary tweak you read on the blogs, you get somethin much slower than eclipse in a week.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#40

The article is extremely poorly translated, and many of the sentences don't make sense. This makes it hard for me to figure out if something was lost in translation or if the author is as ignorant as the translation makes him out to be. I won't go through the post line by line; I think this paragraph sufficiently establishes that the author is ignorant. > The virtue of Unix convention of making a big thing by combini…

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