Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Po Lu]

Ahmed Khanzada <address@hidden> writes:
> That is fair enough. But for extensible editors, features are built by a
> small group of folks interested in that sort of thing. A more
> "mainstream" language usually means more extensions which means more features.

I disagree.  The amount of extensions to an editor reflect the popularity
of the editor, not whether or not the editor's extension language is
"mainstream" or not.

Plus, Emacs Lisp has a bunch of nice goodies for Emacs, since the
language itself is seamlessly integrated with the editor it extends
(such as text properties in strings, buffer-local variables, et cetera).

I would also go as far as to say that writing Emacs programs is far
easier, and involves far less boilerplate, than writing extensions for,
say, VS Code:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
var setting: vscode.Uri = vscode.Uri.parse("untitled:" + "C:\summary.txt");
vscode.workspace.openTextDocument(setting).then((a: vscode.TextDocument) => {
    vscode.window.showTextDocument(a, 1, false).then(e => {
        e.edit(edit => {
            edit.insert(new vscode.Position(0, 0), "Your advertisement here");
        });
    });
}, (error: any) => {
    console.error(error);
    debugger;
});
------------------------------------versus------------------------------------
(with-current-buffer (find-file "~/summary.txt")
  (set-window-point (selected-window) (point-min))
  (insert "Your advertisement here"))
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A better language wins extensions, not a "popular" language, and Emacs
Lisp is definitely more suited to extending editors than TypeScript.