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My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

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Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#31

Post by agumonkey »

jarcane wrote: post #22
agumonkey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programs are so absurd to most people... they have to use rote learning to do anything with it (that's why changing the slightest bit will drive them mad). And most programs are full of hidden state. This is everything a programmer despise, we spend a huge amount of time ensuring our paradigms are principled and transparent, but these qualities rarely make it to the user level. So I cannot but sympathize with normal…

Oh I don't just mean programming; I've run into perfectly intelligent people who nonetheless respond to even the most basic computing tasks as if you've asked them to insert their tenderparts into a badger's den. Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that some people just won't "get" computers, but I've also seen elderly retirees who took to it like a fish to water once you talked them out of being afraid of the thing…

Didn't mean programming either. I wanted to add my sense of the absurd burden put onto normal users with computers. These are systems full of cruft (historical, economical) that is impossible to understand really. Always moving for so-called "progress" and fed through authority (which user would ever question the way MS Office or MS Windows works ? they don't know anything else). So most of them will lose any sense of logic when dealing with these machines/OS and I can't blame them.

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#32

Post by lispm »

bch wrote: post #30
lispm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ousterhout did some marketing pieces and he stated a lot of random things. http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html There was some controversy around it at the time...

I didn't realize that was a very controversial paper. If the timelines are correct though, that wouldn't have been offending rms yet: > rms: That was not the end of the GNU projects involved with Lisp. Later on around 1995, we were looking into starting a graphical desktop project. [...] > > At the time, TCL was being pushed heavily for this purpose. I had a very low opinion of TCL... -- JOs paper appears to be publi…

There were similar earlier claims made by Osterhout. I just picked one which demonstrated the topic.

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#33

Post by ics »

jarcane wrote: post #26
pdpi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My girlfriend couldn't understand why I was reading a kids book as it had an elephant on the front Thought you were going to say it was Learn You a Haskell For Great Good.

I'm actually reading that one right now. It's quite good, and has made a Haskell fan out of me already despite getting a bit fatigued by chapter 8.

Finished chapter 8 yesterday in the middle of a 40C fever. Checked the page number only to realize I wasn't even halfway through...

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#34

Post by dbrower »

zvrba wrote: post #12

"There's an interesting benefit you can get from using such a powerful language as a version of Lisp as your primary extensibility language. You can implement other languages by translating them into your primary language." This is so short-sighted hand-waving; it doesn't take into account the existing ecosystem (libraries, tools, etc.) at all. Unlike lisps and schemes, TCL is way less fragmented and has a bunch of l…

At the time he said it, and about the time of the decision he was making, what you say about the TCL ecosystem was not necessarily true. I was using TCL/TK in '95, and it was clunky then. I have the same misgivings about LUA now, but it seems a better choice for embedding than TCL at the moment.

I keep returning to the "I'd like an embedded scripting language in my C environment" year after year, and there is nothing that has made me pull the trigger yet. TCL is a non-starter for me; LUA is dubious; GUILE is a non-starter with GPL licenseing. Java is clunky and heavyweight, but maybe plausible, though it's more common to JNI C into your Java main. I think it'd be nice to have an embeddable Javascript like v8 that can attach to C underpinnings, but don't know if there is one. Maybe duktape?

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#35

Post by pdpi »

jarcane wrote: post #26
pdpi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My girlfriend couldn't understand why I was reading a kids book as it had an elephant on the front Thought you were going to say it was Learn You a Haskell For Great Good.

I'm actually reading that one right now. It's quite good, and has made a Haskell fan out of me already despite getting a bit fatigued by chapter 8.

Oh you'll be rid of the fatigue soon enough, that's about when the real fun starts :)

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#36

Post by DonHopkins »

hga wrote: post #21
betteringred wrote: post #3

I think it's interesting how he never explicitly says that he forked Gosling Emacs (I think that's what he did, but if not please correct me!). "Therefore, when I wrote my second implementation of Emacs, I followed the same kind of design...Now, this [GNU Emacs] was not the first Emacs that was written in C and ran on Unix. The first was written by James Gosling, ... I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a r…

Yes, he did. At that time or a bit later I worked for UniPress; the owners knew that taking any action about that beyond a polite request would untimely be harmful. But it was seriously reckless of RMS to put his GNU effort in jeopardy.

Mike (the friend at UniPress who RMS mentioned) and I were wandering around an SF convention and ran into RMS. Mike said, "Richard, I heard a rumor about your house being burnt down. Is that true?" Richard immediately shot back "Yes, but where you work, I'd have thought you'd have heard about it in advance!"

We all had a good laugh. RMS is a funny guy and quick of his feet!

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#37

Post by akater »

Bravo, RMS.

I wish I could work on an OS written in Lisp, or in an equivalently expressive language. It's so damn important to have a really user-friendly system easily customizable by non-programmers. Actually, programmers should be routinely put out of their jobs, essentially the same way programmers put others out of theirs. :-)

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#38

Post by orbifold »

zvrba wrote: post #12

"There's an interesting benefit you can get from using such a powerful language as a version of Lisp as your primary extensibility language. You can implement other languages by translating them into your primary language." This is so short-sighted hand-waving; it doesn't take into account the existing ecosystem (libraries, tools, etc.) at all. Unlike lisps and schemes, TCL is way less fragmented and has a bunch of l…

Not really think of Javascript and the browser, Javascript is deeply flawed but still powerfull enough to be the target of several compilers. A language like Guile Scheme has the same potential, while TCL has not.

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#39

Post by akater »

Dewie wrote: post #27
jarcane wrote: post #2

"They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off." That bit really jumped out at me, because it's something I've felt about computers in general for a long time. People get it into their heads that computers are hard/complicated/etc., and so they get scared of them, and so th…

Some people are excited about programming in the sense that they can "make the computer do stuff". But the way I see it, I make the computer "do stuff" by just simply pressing the power-on button. And writing a "hello world" doesn't make the computer accomplish more than to write the same string in a word processor. Maybe some people should just be reminded that programming is not fundamentally different from using a…

Indeed, you can just type “Hello world” in a text editor!

A non-programmer, I'm sure making it a welcome checkpoint at a programming language is an incredibly stupid tradition. It should always be an one-liner that does something no app in the world can do, with clearly identified spots that a newcomer can tweak for their individual needs.

Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

#40

Post by ics »

ics wrote: post #33
jarcane wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually reading that one right now. It's quite good, and has made a Haskell fan out of me already despite getting a bit fatigued by chapter 8.

Finished chapter 8 yesterday in the middle of a 40C fever. Checked the page number only to realize I wasn't even halfway through...

That would be 38C... apparently my brain hasn't fully caught up yet.
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