Re: Emacs Lisp's future (was: Guile emacs thread (again))

[Alexis]

Jorgen Schaefer writes:

> I think the (often-cited, not just here) idea of supporting multiple
> languages is a red herring, mostly. Every extension language supported
> adds some burden on those who want to understand what their editor
> does, not just use pre-packaged code. One of the great things about
> Emacs is that, once I know ELisp, I have a good chance of
> understanding and modifying any extension I see.

+1. It seems to me that much discussion around this issue focuses on
being able to use one's favourite language to extend Emacs, without
considering what it might be like to:

* start using an extension that seems like it might significantly assist
  one's productivity;
* find a show-stopping bug in it; and
* discover that the extension is written in a programming language one
  loves to loathe.

Also, to an (admittedly very limited) extent, it's /already/ possible to
use a number of languages other than ELisp in Emacs, for at least some
things, via org-babel:

http://orgmode.org/manual/Evaluating-code-blocks.html#Evaluating-code-blocks

A list of languages currently supported by org-babel can be found at:

http://orgmode.org/manual/Languages.html#Languages

i would be interested to know what experiences people might have had in
using org-babel as part of an Emacs extension ....

> Speaking of third-party libraries, s.el, dash.el and f.el provide
> things that really ought to be in core Emacs.

Agreed. i've found it quite surprising that simple functions like
-flatten and s-repeat aren't available in ELisp by default.

> The regex engine is annoying to use. Providing some interface to PCRE
> would be a great step forward, and does not even have to be
> backwards-incompatible.

i like this suggestion. i'm rather comfortable with Perl5 REs, and can
find myself frustrated trying to create REs in ELisp. Having said that,
the issue is not usually the syntax of ELisp REs per se (e.g. needing to
escape things like capturing parentheses or the alternatives pipe); it's
needing to escape various things /further/ because REs can only be
specified in the form of a standard ELisp string. On several occasions
i've ended up using a combination of pcre-to-elisp and re-builder to try
to work out if the problem is too few backslashes, too many backslashes,
or both.


Alexis.