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Comment by nathell | Hacker News Reader

That’s the adage oft repeated by people who had had a cursory look at Emacs, but haven’t been really using it. In reality, the opposite is true. Emacs is a great editor, but the operating system that it is [0] is lacking in many ways:

- performance is not great (although it’s getting better with the advent of native compilation in Emacs 28)

- the system language is awkward (no namespaces, dynamic scoping by default, ...)

- no preemptive multithreading

- etc.

On the plus side, it is auto-documenting and extremely malleable.

[0]: Yeah, it can be a full-fledged OS. Just add a Linux kernel: http://informatimago.free.fr/i/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linu...

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> the system language is awkward (no namespaces, dynamic scoping by default, ...)

RMS's dislike of Common Lisp really caused a colossal amount of damage. Imagine an Emacs written in Common Lisp instead of Emacs Lisp, with decades and decades of improvements. Having written a reasonable amount of software in both, Common Lisp Emacs would be very, very preferable, in part for the reasons you list and in part for others (e.g. a full-fledged, built in object system and improved extensibility).

> RMS's dislike of Common Lisp really caused a colossal amount of damage. Imagine an Emacs written in Common Lisp instead of Emacs Lisp, with decades and decades of improvements.

If Emacs were written in Common Lisp, only people on big mainframes would have been able to use it in 1985, and it probably wouldn't have become popular in the first place. Also, implementing Common Lisp would have taken much longer. RMS has said that his main goal with his LISP dialect was to keep the programming language as small and performant as possible, since at that time, machines had maybe 1MB of RAM (if you were lucky) and no virtual memory. This is why for instance he decided against lexical scoping (and still, Emacs was known back then as "eight megabytes and constantly swapping").

IIRC, Coral Common Lisp ran on a Mac Plus, which had 1 MB RAM. It included an editor.

I'm very interested in guile-emacs, not because I think it'll replace main emacs, but I do think it'd be really neat to have my config in a 'cleaner' lisp like scheme, a clojure like language, lokke[0], or even python[1]

[0]: https://github.com/lokke-org/lokke [1]: https://gitlab.com/python-on-guile/python-on-guile

That may be what nyxt browser is trying to do. The author claims that nyxt could be extended to be anything, including an alternative for emacs.

[1] https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/why-building-nyxt-instea...

There has been some work on that over the decades (but of course not enough momentum): https://phemlock.common-lisp.dev/

> dynamic scoping by default

This is not much of a problem in practice these days. As you probably know it's trivial to enable lexical-binding for an entire source file and many (most?) modern packages do just that. It's even on by default in the scratch buffer. Emacs is just more user friendly than most other systems when when it comes to backwards compatibility.

I'm pretty sure when the adage was created it was much closer to the truth. Now it's mostly a joke.

I started using emacs close to 30 years ago. As a text editor, it's pretty much the same as it ever was (the same goes for vi also).

It's not, though, because you now have a wealth of choices beyond the text editor that comes bundled with Emacs.

I mostly meant that what we expect from an OS changed a lot since then.

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