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Emacs is Dead (2010)

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Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#71

Post by evincarofautumn »

rat87 wrote: post #68
evincarofautumn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant human efficiency, not the computer kind.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#72

Post by flyrain »

signa11 wrote: post #63
jpollock wrote: post #14

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…

> In other words, the Unix philosophy. well, emacs claims to be cross-platform , what happens when you are on a non-unix like system ?

Good Point, that's the dilemma of Emacs.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#73

Post by Derbasti »

jzelinskie wrote: post #4

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!

While Python scripting in Vim is very cool, my understanding was that Vim's scripting API was rather limited in comparison to Emacs. Vim only exposes a few hooks with the majority of the editor features implemented in its C core, while Emacs implements pretty much everything in Elisp, thus exposing pretty much everything to extensions.

But please correct me if I'm wrong -- this is just my impression from reading HN etc.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#74

Post by prewett »

tkf wrote: post #28
michaelwww wrote: post #23

"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"

Well, I am Japanese and I am almost sure my translation is right. But I hope calling the s/he "Eccentric" is not very rude. I just thought it is better than "unusual"... or not? Ah, I just notice "unique" fits the context very well. Perhaps I will change that later.

I personally think that "eccentric" is more polite than "unusual," which could be either positive or negative. It's also better than "unique"; I mean, everyone is unique... Given Steve Yegge's hilarious, insightful, and somewhat cheeky rants (after learning Java for a few months, "Kingdom of Nouns" [1] expressed my nascent thoughts exactly), I think he would qualify for "eccentric." I bet he'd even like the term :)

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#75

Post by jlarocco »

monkmartinez wrote: post #33
melling wrote: 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 don't really understand your comment.

What are you doing with emacs.d that requires a burdensome level of effort to keep it "up to date"? What does that even mean? I've been using Emacs almost 10 years, and I very infrequently modify my emacs.d, and I don't know many people who do. Sure, I could spend a lot of time tweaking it and messing around with it, but it'd be an entirely self inflicted thing, and not the fault of Emacs. I could spend all day fiddling with .vimrc, or the Visual Studio settings, too.

I also don't understand the what you mean by "the level of effort required for each project" in the context of Emacs. What "project"s are you talking about?

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#76

Post by irahul »

ajross wrote: post #62
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 -- thi…

> 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,

Isn't the point of the article that emacs shouldn't do it but call upon something which does? I use gocode for go completion in vim. gocode has support for a number of editors and there are instructions to make it work with editors which aren't supported out of the box. That is what the article advocates(and I agree) - use emacs/vimscript for glue code, not for implementing interpreters or completers.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#77

Post by irahul »

gbog wrote: post #39
monkmartinez wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I am not sure what you mean by "every tweak" but fwiw:

    $ ls ~/.vim/bundle | wc -l 
    45

    $ wc -l ~/.vimrc 
    401 /home/rahul/.vimrc


    $ vim --startuptime vim.log

    $ ruby -ne 'print if 2..7 or $. == 151' vim.log

    times in msec
    clock   self+sourced   self:  sourced script
    clock   elapsed:              other lines

    000.810  000.810: --- VIM STARTING ---
    217.536  000.003: --- VIM STARTED ---
> you get somethin much slower than eclipse in a week.

In a week? 6 years and counting.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#78

Post by tenfingers »

to3m wrote: post #50
espadrine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be honest, ELisp is not bad. Not in the same range as VimScript. In fact, ELisp with this weird concept of I/O through buffers makes a lot of sense for a text editor and I find it quite an elegant concept (not always practical, though). And while ELisp is not really CL, the lacking parts are the interpreter and runtime themselves, not the language.

Writing elisp is not hard. What's hard is integrating all the modes, keymaps and quirky behavior of coupling all these smalls bits of code together. This is what makes emacs hard. Emacs, the "core editor" itself, is incredibly small. Way smaller than vim (build it by hand if you don't believe it). Emacs as the editor that you use every day is almost pure extensions.

There's a /whole lot/ of global state in an editor. This is not going to change with Python, Guile or any other language. Users that complain about ELisp, most of the time actually never tried to write ELisp at all (they just glue some elisp around in .emacsrc). That's fine, but they don't realize what's going on under the hood. The C/C++ mode in emacs is completely different to the "stupid" syntax highlighting in Vim or most other editors.

I normally recommend switching to another editor if after several years you still don't appreciate the difference. IMHO emacs, as it is, is a great editor. ELisp is part of the success (though guile would be a step forward).

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#79

Post by yarrel »

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.

The screeching brakes sound of context switches in Vim is not more "efficient" than just pressing a key combination to perform whichever transformation on text you wish to effect in Emacs.

I use Emacs to edit text, and I have limbs I'd rather lose than have to perform that task with Vim's airbag in my face.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#80

Post by jlgreco »

yarrel wrote: post #79
evincarofautumn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The screeching brakes sound of context switches in Vim is not more "efficient" than just pressing a key combination to perform whichever transformation on text you wish to effect in Emacs. I use Emacs to edit text, and I have limbs I'd rather lose than have to perform that task with Vim's airbag in my face.

> Vim is not more "efficient" than just pressing a key combination

Vim and Emacs both use key combinations... Vim's just require fewer fingers at once. You type Vim key combinations as you would type words in a language with a latin alphabet.

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