Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbp | Hacker News Reader

In Emacs, every key is evaluating some Lisp expression. You are interactively using Emacs Lisp in a funny sort of REPL. Most of the time you just use predefined commands and they do what you want, but if you know there's a whole programming language there, then you'll see opportunities to take advantage of that sometimes, just like how sometimes it's nice to be able to write a for loop or a pipeline at a bash prompt.

Once you get used to that model of using a computer, it feels crippling to use applications that you can't easily program in on the fly. It's the difference between having a full programming language and a bunch of buttons you can press, and it's for something you're going to be doing a lot for a long time.

View on HN

I don’t doubt that a skilled Emacs user would be more efficient at editing text than I am. But I don’t have any problems with my ability to efficiently edit text. The problems that I get paid to solve are ‘how do I effectively deliver value to my customers’ and ‘how can I design solutions and systems that meet the business’ needs’. The kind of challenges that I have to overcome to meet these goals do not include ‘I’m not efficient enough at editing text’. If I were to reach a perfect 100% efficiency in text editing, I doubt it would have much impact on my productivity, and I know that I would have no impact at all on the quality of my work. My IDE already has a lot of productivity tools, perhaps I could improve that by learning Emacs, but I’ve never seen the RoI in devoting time to that, over devoting time to learning any number of other things that would actually make me better at my job.

> Once you get used to that model of using a computer, it feels crippling to use applications that you can't easily program in on the fly.

Funnily enough, that's how I feel about Lisp itself: I love having a language I can program at runtime, at compile-time, at read-time (and, in a decent editor, at edit-time).

It really makes me wish that there were a decent modern Lisp OS. It'd need some solution to run Firefox and emulate emacs. Maybe when I retire I'll devote my remaining years to that.

I feel obligated to point out that people have run emacs as pid 1 on Linux. That's... some level of lisp OS, surely.

I don't believe they have, in any real capacity. Can emacs reap processes? Is there an elisp binding for every kernel syscall?

I'd be interested to see the results of a survey of how many Emacs users use Emacs Lisp in any capacity beyond cut-and-pasting examples found online into their .emacs or .emacs.d/ configs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com