Re: Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master)

[João Távora]

Tomas Hlavaty <tom@logand.com> writes:

>>> It is not a choice between one or the other.  I need both.  Please do
>>> not break grep and web search.
>>
>> I explained how they are already "broken".  In CL (the topic of this
>> particular subthread), by packages and in every language that has any
>> type of indirection.  I'm saying they were never really "good" to begin
>> with, not if you want to use the full available power in those
>> languages.
>
> Neither of the two options are perfect.
> As I said, I need both to work as well as possible.

Right.  But it's a trade-off between language expressive power (the
power to express more in less characters) and repetition and verbosity.
That does give the power of locality and enables things as grep (though
they're always flawed as we've seen), but it comes at the expense of
hard and brittle couplings.

>From your arguments, it seems you don't like namespace features in
languages.  That strikes me, personally, as odd, from a Common Lisp
programmer as you present yourself, but I respect it.

"Proper" namespaces have been proposed numerous times for Emacs, and
people can and do get around the practical problems with numerous
strategies.  The most prominent of which happened some years ago with
the creation of very popular libraries with very short suffixes: s.el,
dash.el and f.el all above the 99.9 downloads percentile in MELPA.  But
that is by no means the only one: people will use macros and "break
grep" happily with something simple and innocent as flet or labels or
putting anonymous functions in local variables, because in Emacs,
interning a symbol is a big responsibility.  All these things I consider
worse, even just from a grep-lover perspective, than criterious use of
namespacing.  As with any language feature, use it wisely.

João