| What I mean is "coarse-grained composition with text/bytes" (described in the blog post in my first reply) If you're thinking that's tautological (how else would Common Lisp and Clojure communicate?), then this subthread might help with the context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30814716 I don't think Common Lisp, Clojure, and Racket are compatible with Emacs' s-expression format. Lots of people here are saying they use JSON or the like with Lisp, not s-expressions. Emacs can use its own format to communicate with itself, because it controls what process is on the other side of the wire. (In any case, any variety of s-expressions IS TEXT; there are non-trivial issues to get it back in memory -- like what to do about graphs and sharing, node cycles, integer sizes, string encodings, etc.) But the point of the slogan is that when you have even a small bit of heterogeneity (among Lisps) then what you're left with is "Unix". A Lisp machine isn't a big win for this reason. It is cool that Lisp machines had a robust ABI. That could solve the IPC problem. But then you have the problem of a Lisp machine communicating with a Unix machine, which I'm sure was a very real thing back in the day. So now you're left with the lowest common denominator of Unix. Again that is coarse-grained composition over wires, which is analogous to shell. The shell doesn't have to be involved strictly speaking, but the syscalls that are made and parsing that is done is pretty much the same. |