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Comment by jpollock | Hacker News Reader

When you get towards the bottom of the article, it actually says that this is a strength of emacs, and not a weakness.

The claim is that the weak lisp interpreter encourages work to be done in other processes (reference to the awesome Tramp), thus making the feature available to other editors (Vim, TextMate), and the shell. The author compares this philosophy to Eclipse's where everything is a Java plugin written just for Eclipse.

The claim that Emacs is dead rises from the shift in the latest versions to large included language processing plugins (JS2-Mode and Semantic) which provide rich language processing capabilities but are implemented in pure Emacs Lisp.

The author closes off by stating,

    "The reason why Emacs platform is good is that it cooperates with OS, not because it is good by itself".

In other words, the Unix philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

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The awesome Tramp, is it? IMHO, of all the software on my hard drive that I use regularly, Tramp is the most likely to break or hiccup in a novel or unfathomable way.

It does fill a need or 3, I must admit, and I hate to be negative, but if that is the best example you can come up with of the positive effects of putting Emacs functionality in external programs, that makes me lean towards the conclusion that it is a bad idea to put Emacs functionality in external programs!

Some awesome Emacs Lisp programs that relies on external programs:

mu4e: http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

not much: http://notmuchmail.org/

EDBI: https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-edbi

ropemacs: http://rope.sourceforge.net/ropemacs.html

RSense: http://cx4a.org/software/rsense/index.html

GCCSense: http://cx4a.org/software/gccsense/index.html

emacs-ipython-notebook: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook

emacs-jedi: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-jedi

request.el: http://tkf.github.io/emacs-request/

Well, the last three is my projects so you could exclude that :)

Also, we could add version conrolling interfaces such as magit and VC (relying on git/svn/hg/...) and advanced interpreter such as SLIME/nrepl.el/geiser.

Ah, and don't forget dired!

And then again, they are pain in the arse (if not impossible) to use on Windows. One of the benefits of ELisp extensions is that they are multiplatform.

I agree some of them are harder to setup in Windows. But it helps (or forces) developers to make these tools and languages cross-platform, which is good, I think. And I guess making them cross-platform is actually easier than implementing them purely in Emacs Lisp.

> In other words, the Unix philosophy.

well, emacs claims to be cross-platform, what happens when you are on a non-unix like system ?

Good Point, that's the dilemma of Emacs.

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