Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by metroholografix 761 days ago
Emacs (besides the lowlevel internals such as the garbage collector, graphics toolkit and virtual machine) is written in Emacs Lisp which means that it's also fully programmable by the user, at runtime, without restarts/loss of state. Moreover, every aspect of Emacs is designed to facilitate runtime modification and live programming. This level of introspection goes beyond anything available today except some Smalltalk environments (which lose on practicality).

VSCode is just another editor with a constrained "API" that limits the modifications one can do. Emacs is clay that one can fully mold to one's own preferences so that it becomes an extension of one's mind.
2 comments
lispm 761 days ago
> This level of introspection goes beyond anything available today except some Smalltalk environments (which lose on practicality).

GNU Emacs has a bunch of user-facing C code which can't be changed live.

Many Lisp systems (and also applications) provide runtime introspection&reflection&modification. See for example Interlisp ( https://interlisp.org ) which was already a full live programming environment with managed source code in the 70s.

link
metroholografix 761 days ago
It's nice to see Interlisp restored and widely available but it's not Emacs. More a curiosity than something practical and it's looking like it still belongs in the 70s.

There's also Genera (in many ways the best but unfortunately still not widely available), Lispworks (commercial, lacks the features/userbase of Emacs) and a vast number of niche Lisp-based/Smalltalk-based/Forth-based environments that don't come close to the practicality of Emacs.

For all intents and purposes, Emacs is the 'best' freely available and most used Lisp machine we have today, a direct manifestation of Licklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis".

The recent additions of sqlite3 and native compilation (MPS-based garbage collection is in the works) have significantly expanded the set of problems one can solve. I love Common Lisp but I barely touch it these days, as I tend to reach for Emacs Lisp instead. That's solely down to the evolution and practicality of Emacs.

link
lispm 761 days ago
> More a curiosity than something practical and it's looking like it still belongs in the 70s.

Emacs also belongs to the 70s. The UI basics were from TECO Emacs, mid 70s and many are still there. Stuff like the "Meta" key which no longer exists, or the buffer metaphor. EINE/ZWEI and Multics Emacs were also developed then. Again, the basic stuff is still in GNU Emacs. Cursor handling in GNU Emacs is like it was in the 70s.

> For all intents and purposes, Emacs is the 'best' freely available and most used Lisp machine we have today

I don't see GNU Emacs as a "Lisp Machine", it's a mostly text-ui based development platform & environment written in C+Lisp and its usage is at the same time limited by its oldish user interface. There is a lot of useful software written in it, but the actual broader use of GNU Emacs is limited to a very nerd-like group. I've used GNU Emacs to read/write mail (for example). But that was long ago. There is a limited appeal of the text-oriented UI, which also has a hard time to adapt to devices like phones or tablets.

> practicality of Emacs

The practicality of GNU Emacs is also limited, because its user interface would not reach larger groups of current users.

> but I barely touch it these days, as I tend to reach for Emacs Lisp instead

It's also funny that many people would like to move GNU Emacs Lisp more towards Common Lisp, but they are not allowed to do so... -> see the repeated discussions (since many many years) on the developer mailing list...

link
igouy 761 days ago
> lose on practicality

Compared to Emacs Lisp. How are you evaluating practicality?

link