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Emacs is Dead (2010)

tkf.github.io

41–50 of 115 posts

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#41
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.

I just use emacs-live (https://github.com/overtone/emacs-live) with a few tweaks (https://github.com/jamii/emacs-live-packs) so most of the work is done by someone else.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#42
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".

If somebody called me 少し変わった I would be a little taken aback, I think. I arguably am a bit 変わった for many reasons, but it's not the kind of thing you say to somebody's face.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#43

re: the social value of emacs-lisp parsers/code-completion etc, perhaps someone could supply an API where other programs can query a headless emacs runtime. I defer to the author's experience when he says that emacs is a poor runtime for simultaneous editing + compute, but perhaps it's acceptable for compute-only (and this separate-process approach could in theory improve interactivity for the emacs editor as well).…

> My emacs at times can't keep up with my typing. But I love what it does for me.

Try to set debugger on (M-x toggle-debug-on-quit) and when emacs stops responding press C-g to get to know what was emacs doing.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#44
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.

I just use Elpa, cross my fingers, and try not to tweak or memorize too many things. I am rather happy like that.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#45
post #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! :-)

My favorite of TKF's packages is auto-complete: https://github.com/auto-complete/auto-complete

It's an elegant and very powerful extension of the built-in completion that works particularly well on reallyStupidlyLongMethodNames in programming languages - especially handy in conjunction with tags and cscope if you're jumping around a large codebase. Dunno if it plays well with Evil mode though.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#46
post #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! :-)

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

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#47

This is actually really interesting from a vim user's perspective. We've long sought after an extension language as good as emacs lisp and finally now have gotten the news that vim plans to eventually phase out vimscript in favor of Python. The future looks good!

I think you have misinterpreted something. There have been a lot of Vim patches recently that are dramatically improving the long-existing Python scripting support in preparation for the upcoming Vim 7.4 release. But Bram has not said anything about "phasing out" VimScript. The two languages will continue to coexist (along with the handful of others that are also supported). There is far too much investment in VimScr…

It is very likely that during the hype I had misinterpreted the 7.4 plans. I was under the impression that the work on Python was trying to make it the dominant means of extending vim while keeping vimscript for legacy reasons. I mean this is still technically feasible, but would require the support of the whole vim community. I would go on about how it's weird that many vim users aren't familar vimscript, but I'd feel like I'm preaching to the choir. Thanks for clearing things up.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#48
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-notebo…

And then again, they are pain in the arse (if not impossible) to use on Windows. One of the benefits of ELisp extensions is that they are multiplatform.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#49
This is a very good point. Check out http://vimeo.com/39938276, a video about Ensime, a Scala/Java IDE as an external process. Daniel Spiewak makes largely the same point as this article: interprocess communication provides much better reusability than baking things in to a single process, whether that be Emacs or Eclipse.

bitwize makes another good point: this is less the "philosophy of Emacs", and more the philosophy of Unix (or perhaps, more specifically, Acme). It's ironic that some of the best parts of Emacs are the ones that look less like a Lisp Machine and more like a Unix pipeline, but there it is.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#50
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misread the philosophy he talked about. He actually thinks that having the problems about threading, libraries and low APIs is a good thing, as it helps us maximizing social value of software we develop.

Guile integration may matter, assuming it happens (not everybody seems happy: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-04/msg00... ) Python in Vim has slowly become the go-to choice to talk to an external program from Vim, because VimScript is simply that bad. I know little, however, about how hard ELisp makes it to interface with an external program. The examples he gives (a JS interpreter in ELisp, and S…

It's actually pretty easy to run external programs from elisp. stdin comes from a buffer, and stdout/stderr go to a buffer, and you can use all the usual emacs facilities on the result. See the various interactive modes (e.g., M-x run-python, M-x shell) for a demonstration.

I suspect people who write packages entirely in elisp simply like elisp. And why not? The language itself is mostly OK to use, even if it doesn't always conform to modern standards.

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