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by untilted 571 days ago
> Compare that to, like, lexical scoping or parametric polymorphism, which most languages just have by default at this point. They’re almost mathematical facts.

FWIW emacs lisp (in)famously still defaults to dynamic scoping -- there's been a proposal to change that default earlier this month but interestingly, there's still pushback. See e.g. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-11/msg00...
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dan-robertson 571 days ago
At one time it was thought that implementing lexical scoping for a lisp (with lambdas, etc) was not possible to do performantly and this is one of the reasons that lots of lisps had dynamic scoping. That said, scheme has lexical scoping and I think that predates GNU Emacs by a reasonable amount of time.
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kreetx 571 days ago
AFAIK, dynamic scoping is still the default because of compatibility: older extensions might rely on it. For any new extension, the author should turn it on from the get go.
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