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> so I don't have to use Emacs While there are many reasons to perhaps stay away from Emacs, realistically, for any serious Lisper, there's just no other alternative - sadly or otherwise. I think, collectively, as the industry force, we software developers having now to pay imperceptible price for disregarding the pragmaticism we had/have in systems like Lisp and Smalltalk. We standardized on dead artifacts: text files compiled into opaque binaries, restarted on every change. We rebuilt weaker versions of what those systems had, piecemeal, decades later, and call them innovations. You don't notice the cost because it's spread out. Nobody ever gets handed the bill. Instead it shows up as little bits of friction across millions of hours of work: slow feedback, extra steps, tools that treat a running program like you can't touch it. We took the accidental limits of file-based, restart-everything development and assumed that's just how programming works. And quietly, all together, we paid a huge price for giving up the live, flexible systems we already had. Emacs is one of the last mainstream artifacts that still embodies that old ethos. For serious Lisp work the alternatives are pale because they still treat code as text to be sent elsewhere, rather than a live system you live inside. This lock-in isn't some kind of nostalgia, it's just nothing else preserves that property. I wish there were more Emacs-like systems, instead of dozens of tools that all trying to solve same or similar problems - how many different tools are there for Python alone just to unmess its cascaded dependency woes? Or look at the whole containerization tower - Docker, Compose, k8s, Helm, Nix - all because we've "forgotten" how to reliably reconstruct a running program's state. TLDR: Don't ignore Lisp - it's not archaic, it's not "theoretical", it's practical, it works and it works well. And once you get some serious footing with Lisp, you'll sooner or later come to appreciate Emacs, and then will be forever frustrated that we don't build Emacs-like systems anymore. You'll hate Emacs and whenever you do, you'd be reminded that there's no better alternative in existence. Sadly or otherwise. |