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by iLemming 5 days ago
What do you mean by "richer ecosystem"? Have you ever seen GitHub language stats - there's so much Elisp on GitHub alone, it's absolute bananas. The amount of Elisp in the wild probably surpasses the amount of Clojure, CL and Racket combined. And mind that it isn't "a general use" PL - it exists for one and single purpose.

Lem is great and I'm happy there's finally something out there to challenge Emacs' hegemony, yet pragmatically, unless someone builds a way to run Elisp in Lem, it's unlikely to overthrow Emacs anytime soon, and that's just not gonna happen.

Org-mode, Magit, and thousands of packages aren't just "Elisp code" - they depend on Emacs' specific buffer model, text properties, overlays, markers, the display engine, process handling, and countless quirks packages rely on (intentionally or not). A Lem Elisp interpreter that didn't also reimplement all of that faithfully would run trivial `.el` files and choke on anything real. At that point you've reimplemented Emacs inside Lem.

Elisp is not the biggest point here and Neovim proves that with pivoting to Lua; the crux is the runtime and the corpus, and reimplementing those is the actual mountain. That is real ecosystem for whatever reason you're choosing to simply ignore.
1 comments
cmrdporcupine 5 days ago
Lem already has a clone of legit. And there's org-mode-alikes, as well.

There's very little I miss when I use lem, TBH.

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iLemming 4 days ago
That's plausible and isn't too hard to imagine. The value of Emacs is not the concrete implementation of it - let's be honest, GNU Emacs is not void of enormously annoying warts. The value of Emacs is the nice foundational Lisp layer - something Lem does provide.

One side of me wants to remain skeptical - knowing how much stuff there exists in Org-mode and Magit - piles and piles of different workflows thousands of users had to go through over the years - a bunch of well-trodden paths.

At the same time, I am well-acquainted with the power of Lisp and its communities. Give Lispers a powerful engine, and they'd take it to the moon and beyond. Lem's been steadily developing over the past few years and slowly been adding users, at least I keep hearing of curious people trying it. Meanwhile Org-mode's core feels almost stagnant, and it's one of the "killer apps" of Emacs. Lem might be on the brink of making things so appealing that it would be hard to refuse it. For some lispers that's already the case. I'm wholeheartedly welcome this challenge to Emacs' hegemony. I love Emacs and I hate Emacs, because sadly (or otherwise) I don't see any practical alternative for it - anyone who thinks nvim or vscode are even in the same room are clueless. Perhaps, the time to seriously consider Lem is almost (?), already (?) here.

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