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Emacs is Dead (2010)

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Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#61

Post by espadrine »

TylerE wrote: post #19
p4bl0 wrote: 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]…

Why guile, which has exactly zero usage outside a few GNUtoys. Why not, e.g. Racket? If you're going to go the trouble, _get it right_.

Emacs is an RMS-run GNU project.

Back in 2002, the better choice was Common Lisp. One of CLISP's authors even made it work with Emacs over the course of a week-end [1].

There's never going to be the perfect fit for an embedded extension language. Hey, wasn't that what Lua wanted to be, and Tcl before it? Guile certainly isn't the easiest fit, but it's the only one that will get accepted.

At least, if they slowly change the actual extension language away from ELisp, all extensions that rely on external programs will survive better.

[1]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2002-08/msg000...

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#62

Post by ajross »

quotemstr wrote: post #59

That's funny: for a dead project, there's an awful lot of traffic on emacs-devel, a big user community, lots of interesting new projects (like org-mode), and an amazing amount of utility. If this is what a dead project looks like, the living really ought to envy the dead.

The title is linkbait, but I think (as a two-decade emacs user, mind you) that the technical points are actually pretty sound. Emacs absolutely is crufty when you try to stretch it beyond its original paradigm. Elisp, as an environment, is woefully primitive compared to the kind of elegance and integration you can achieve with more modern languages. The example of code completion is actually pretty informative -- this is something that IDEs were doing routinely 15 years ago that emacs still doesn't do well, or in many cases at all (for languages other than elisp, of course).

Now, that doesn't outweight the good, and I still use it, and probably will until I die. But I think if you want to be honest about things you need to think seriously about what emacs would look like if you "started from scratch" with the same philosophy but with modern goals. Probably not like Eclipse for sure, nor even Sublime. But it probably wouldn't look much like GNU Emacs either...

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#63

Post by signa11 »

jpollock wrote: post #14
p4bl0 wrote: 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]…

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…

> In other words, the Unix philosophy.

well, emacs claims to be cross-platform, what happens when you are on a non-unix like system ?

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#64

Post by PuercoPop »

Speaking of Steve Yegge he is currently writing an 'ide as a service'. He recounts people has accused him of having the hidden agenda of advancing the cause of emacs. I think he would agree with m2ym's assessment of the philosophy of Emacs

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#65

Post by vvhn »

bitwize wrote: post #37
joshAg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

eh ? like your parent comment pointed out - it's a quip by us vi users, not "wisdom" (conventional or otherwise) :-)

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#68

Post by rat87 »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #54
joshAg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It might be a joke, but it’s quite true. Vim is an excellent and efficient text editor, and Vim users consequently tend to see Emacs as a powerful but massively inefficient text editor. Which of course it is, but it’s also a massively efficient keyboard interface to an interactive text-based Lisp environment. If you’re just using Emacs to edit text, you’re missing out.

These days many users of vim tend to use many plugins making it in some ways a lot like emacs. Also emacs isn't particularly inefficient on modern machines other then problems with the ui and single threading which I believe vim shares.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#69

Post by philsnow »

monkmartinez wrote: post #55
philsnow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you follow @melpa_emacs on twitter? Packages are not static by a loooooong shot. I am mainly interested in using emacs for Python, Org-mode, JS, HTML. In terms of years of use, I am on year three or so... but I like to keep my shit on lock. My biggest mistake was trying Pycharm. Now I constantly compare Emacs to Pycharm... and it just doesn't compare.

I build my emacs from trunk every ~1-3 months for No Good Reason (tm), and I scarcely ever have anything in my own configuration (init.el, custom.el, various random things I've installed in ~/.emacs.d) break.

(I also edit python in emacs regularly, not sure what's changed in the last N years)

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#70

Post by aidenn0 »

bitwize wrote: 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…

Actually emacs has a decent text editor now:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

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