Hacker News Reader

I must admit to having wondered why there is not a greater use of Lisp in window managers. Lisp would seem the ideal language to use for tweaking a desktop. Xmonad (in Haskell) seems to have taken most of the attention of keyboard lovers and tweakers, but Lisp would seem to me to be a better fit.

View on HN

Why not write the window manager itself in Haskell (e.g., xmonad [1]) to take advantage of Haskell's type system, and provide extension points to allow users to tweak the desktop environment in the language of their choice -- for example, Scheme [2] or Python [3]?

[1]: http://xmonad.org/

[2]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/husk-scheme

[3]: https://github.com/bjpop/berp

Why not write the product in language X and then make it extensible via language Y?

Well... For one it wouldn't be the emacs of window managers.

If you want to go the full mile, you should go the full mile. Trying to do half a mile subset and hoping it is the right subset gets tiresome pretty quickly.

I deeply respect them for doing it this way.

>Well... For one it wouldn't be the emacs of window managers.

Emacs is some primitives written in C wrapped by a massive amount of Elisp extensions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com