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Comment by pete_aykroyd | Hacker News Reader

I mostly agree with that although I think it's also kind of irrelevant in a practical sense because many programmers already have to know javascript for their work so you get a lot more people who can contribute right away.

Aside from that -- lisp or javascript as the extension language, I'd love to see a brand-new extensible editor like emacs just to have a shot at changing terminology and some of the APIs. Emacs terminology is a little off-putting because it was invented before the GUIs were widely adopted so it doesn't map that well. I also find some of the APIs a bit weird, but that could just be me.

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It's true that a lot of people work with Javascript, but honestly I wouldn't say that they can contribute to anything right away. A lot of these people don't know more than

  $('#element').hide();

In fact, I would wager that there are more potential contributors to Emacs than there are to Atom.

But if someone just wants to customize their text editor, $('#element').hide();, or something not orders of magnitude more complex, would actually be useful.

Yeah, it's definitely true that a large percentage of people who "know" javascript have about that much knowledge. But still, if you look at absolute numbers of people who can make a function and write a for loop in JS, it's still going to dwarf the number of people who can loop and write a defun in elisp.

That's totally exaggerating. Anyone who is that green to code is probably not even thinking extending their editor yet, and any working programmer has picked up more than enough JS in their to be able to write and understand far more than that line.

Plus, Emacs is a ghost town anyway. You're going to run into the problem that there are not bodies willing to use the editor, let alone extend it.

What'd be cool is an editor that had LLVM IR as a low-level extension language. At runtime, it'd JIT your plugin, and go.

Have you seen Light Table? Go check it out!

Good point!

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