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by agumonkey 4626 days ago
The fluidity of lisp based software is something very rare. Trying to extend Eclipse is a huge pain: need to create a plugin project, learn the overwhelming api, all this to get a Hello World menu entry. Extending emacs is two LoC and one shortcut away. Except for the visual side of things, emacs will ingest any feature ever produced by any new editor on the block. I felt it when I watched a 2 hour long video about sublime or textmate and how it was revolutionary whereas there was nothing remotely new in it (except on the pre-integration).

ps: Personally I'd love to see a rewrite of emacs main packages, it's not lispy/functional enough for my tastes. Something in the lines of alan kay minimalism (see VPRI, Ometa)
2 comments
sparkie 4625 days ago
> ps: Personally I'd love to see a rewrite of emacs main packages, it's not lispy/functional enough for my tastes.

There's a project underway to create a Guile base for emacs, which will include an elisp interpreter for compatibility. Scheme is more lispy than lisp, and lexical scoping is an obvious win. Hopefully this project will be a huge cleanup and simplify things.

There's also a Guile project called Emacsy, which is an attempt to create an embeddable library for the kind of core, non text-editing functionality emacs has, to be used in other apps (eg, minibuffers, keybindings, runtime configuration etc).

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agumonkey 4625 days ago
I know these. While they're still working on it, since emacs24 elisp with lexical scoping, and some 'stdlib' like dash could help simplify things. People were also discussing writing some non-toy-project lazy stream library that could be very helpfull to process buffers in a functional manner.

Have you used emacsy yourself ? I like this project a lot, and wanna extend many programs with it but I'm not versed into this kind of C programming.

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pjmlp 4625 days ago
That is more to do with Eclipse's design than the language being used.

Eclipse suffers from the typical Enterprise Architecture design.

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agumonkey 4625 days ago
Isn't it a side effect of java compilation ? it's a lot less easy to install functions at runtime than in lisps (or other languages alike)
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pjmlp 4625 days ago
Not really.
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