Hacker News Reader

Modern to me in that context means "recent." Good luck writing an ancient API today.

"Modern" roughly means "familiar to someone born in the 21st century, and who has only ever seen computers with glossy, composited desktops".

It doesn't really mean anything, it is just a modern thing to say when announcing a software project.

Emacs is 40-odd-plus years old, and so are many of the names of functions in it. As a result, they may not have intuitive or obvious names. Emacs also does not use namespaces. That makes discoverability even harder.

In f.el and so on, the functions are consistently named and prefixed with `f-'; this is indeed what makes it modern.

TIL that we can have around 26 modern APIs in emacs.

Faux-namespacing by convention looks appealing on first glance/in isolation, but I think it falls apart in the context of the overall emacs package ecosystem.

In this case, it is due to emacs having it's own way of modelling a lot of things for a long time. Modern only means "like the other API we tends to use elsewhere these days".

...and lightweight and small

"minimalist" (aka unfinished)

In this case, it seems to mean "what I'm used to"