> It's solving a problem people don't really have.
Isn’t "I want to script Emacs but I don’t like LISP" a problem to solve?
Isn’t "I want to script Emacs but I don’t like LISP" a problem to solve?
I don't think it's that unusual. Emacs is quite popular. If even 25% of the user base coded in Lisp, it would be ... astonishing.
Source: am Emacs user, have a few (not a lot) functions that I cobbled together from things I did all the time.
Who decides they want a script-able editor, but then chooses one scripted in a language they don't like and don't want to learn?
Probably not (except those who made that project).
> Who decides they want a script-able editor, but then chooses one scripted in a language they don't like and don't want to learn?
Mostly because the scripting language is not the first thing you think about when using an editor (just guessing here; I don’t have data on that). I started using Vim because its editing capabilities are quite powerful but its scripting language is really bad. Emacs’ LISP is great, but I can’t get used to the way Emacs commands work.
Clearly, power is the only measure one should consider when picking a programming language. And Lisp surely has more power than Go. I'm going to guess 36.1% more power, to be exact.
>and what can be done about it
We could always start performing eugenics to get rid of them.
... Okay, I apologize for being an ass. But I hope my points aren't lost; the way you're phrasing things makes it feel like you're bitter that anyone would consider using something that's not Lisp.
There have been attempts in the past to do similar bridges to Python and Javascript IIRC, but they ended up nowhere since they didn't mesh well with the existing ecosystem.
No matter how bad people think Emacs Lisp is (an incorrect impression, Emacs Lisp has improved tremendously) it's still a powerful Lisp and only a Lisp would provide the powerful extensibility that Emacs has.
I think language bridges suck, but this isn't one. It transpiles Go to Lisp bytecode, making it much closer to a first class citizen.
But more importantly, the tagline of the project isn't "Let's write Emacs in Go," nor is it "Emacs Lisp is bad," it's "Not a fan of Emacs Lisp? Hack Emacs in Go!" -- that seems pretty straightforward to me. The aim of this seems to be potential Emacs users who do not code Lisp and don't like it. There are plenty of reasons to not like Lisp, not just Emacs Lisp, including the power that it possesses, just like there are plenty of reasons to not like Go. To suggest otherwise would be elitist.
The way I see it, the potential here is to open Emacs scripting up to a wider audience of people who are not necessarily all the same kind of programmers, who may prefer more typing to more magic.
Would you please list those reasons?
Since you asked though, I'll go into my personal list. You'll note that much of these can just as easily be advantages depending on the situation and I'm by no means saying that this list applies to all things and all people (in fact it objectively doesn't.)
- The syntax: duh. Its elegant in how it mixes code and data, and unifies so much functionality into one syntax. But it has a number of disadvantages. One, the number of parens is cumbersome. You can get used to it, but it's still cumbersome. Two, it isn't always intuitive; sometimes infix syntax just plain feels ergonomically better, all flaws aside. This can absolutely be said about math. Lisp takes order of operations out of the picture, but the same would be true if you threw a shit to of parens into any language, so I feel that doesn't count.
- It's absolutely magical. It's so powerful that I wouldn't trust most programmers to wield it. It's so powerful I wouldn't trust me to wield it. I like programs that are obvious. One of Go's strengths is that it is very stupid, for example, leading to stupid code that is stupid readable by anyone (even if they're.. you get the idea.)
- Lisp feels like the world of wheel reinvention. I don't know if that's due to the language or the community that surrounds it, but I'd guess it's at least a little bit of both.
- Lisp is a dynamic language. By nature this is going to mean you can do less things with code statically. I'm a big fan of static typing for the obvious advantages it brings to larger projects.
- Finally, comfort. Lisp is obviously a language that has stood the test of time, but even despite that Lisp programmers are far and few in the industry. Most people are going to be familiar with imperative programming languages based off of C like syntax, or maybe something closer to Python. Either way, if you pick a random programmer off the street, you wouldn't assume they knew Lisp. (Unless their beard was really long.)
I think some of your points are valid, although some of them (syntax and static typing vs dynamic typing) are mostly down to preferences or getting used to different ways of working.
I think, for example, that, given the choice between those two, i'd rather have macros (lisp macros) instead of static typing.
As for the beard comment, yes, the longer the beard, the easier is to get into Lisp.
I just wanted to note, however, that Lisp is an imperative programming language, just as C or Python is. (Of course, Lisp also allows functional programming and Common Lisp allows fantastically good object oriented programming). So yes, i agree, "most people are going to be familiar with imperative programming languages based off of C-like syntax". But on the other hand, Lisp syntax is much easier to learn than C-like syntax.
The implementation language does matter a lot in this case, because the part of Emacs that is written in Emacs Lisp (~90% of Emacs) can and should be leveraged (modified, extended or used to build upon) at runtime by users. This is what gives Emacs it's tremendous flexibility and power.
Using anything other than a Lisp with semantics close to Emacs Lisp for user code that leverages what Emacs offers built-in, will be an exercise in frustration since a lot of the power I described will be so cumbersome to access and make use of. It's been tried before, multiple times by people not very familiar with Emacs Lisp, and it has never worked out.
Experienced Emacs Lisp developers immediately understand the futility and pointlessness of such endeavors which is why you never see them attempt them.
>We could always start performing eugenics to get rid of them.
I meant more like what we could do to improve the more powerful languages to make them more appealing.
I'm less bitter than I am perplexed about the choice to use Go over Lisp.
But I find the rhetoric quite closed-minded, because I doubt any of the people replying here who've just found out about this and are calling it a bad idea have actually tried it yet. Clearly, there are advantages to Lisp that you would lose if you tried to do something in Go. But nobody is acknowledging the reverse, that there may also be advantages in Go to Lisp that are unforeseen, even for this specific task.
All in all this is a disappointing development. I don't think it would go over the same in other text editor communities, because people seem very defensive about the use of languages in place of Lisp where they might not be so defensive about the use of languages in place of say, VimScript.
I found some optimizations that are not implemented inside Emacs lapcode optimizer. If I will port them to byte-opt everyone win, right (if they pass Emacs team review, of course)?