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Comment by aaronem | Hacker News Reader

Elsewhere in that thread:

> The idea sounds nice in theory, but in practice multiple name spaces do not fit into Lisp very well. Common Lisp packages are an unclean kludge; this was clear to me when I implemented them in the 1980s in the Lisp Machine. It is impossible to use them in the way one would wish to use them. > > In practice, you have to write the package prefix whenever you refer to a symbol that has one. It might as well be part of the symbol name itself. Thus, packages complicate the language definition while providing no benefit. > > So in GNU Emacs I decided to make them part of the symbol name itself and not have packages.

Agree or disagree as you like, but there is a reason: based on his experience with Lisp Machine Lisp, RMS didn't see the point.

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I don't think his argument is very convincing, because it focuses on only one aspect of namespaces: how many characters do I have to type?

Old-style programmers who came of age in the 70's and 80's were absolutely obsessed with keeping the number of characters typed as low as possible. There was a reason for this: the keyboards in those days were terrible. I typed my Master's thesis and my PhD dissertation on VT100 terminal keyboards that had a throw of about 1 cm and required a few hundred newtons to get the damned keys to move at all, much less make a clean contact at the switch. It was more like punching a speed-bag for your fingers than typing on a modern keyboard.

But reducing the number of characters typed is not the only reason for having namespaces, nor is it the most important one. When you add a feature to a language you are saying to the users, "The people who designed this language felt that this feature was important enough to implement so we think it is worth your time to use it." That kind of moral persuasion is not to be under-estimated.

In the case of namespaces, having the feature encourages developers working in that language to think more carefully about how to modularize their code.

This argument may also not be enough to justify the complexity, but when evaluating such things there should be some attempt to cover all the arguments for and against, not just pull out the one you happened to find persuasive.

I can certainly see his point of view. I feel it falls on the Worse is Better side of decision making when he says they make the language definition easier.

While packages may not be a great solution they do at least make the the concept of namespacing explicit and a first class citizen of the language.

In a way I agree with this at the level of a package's external interface, but I think it's nice that with CL style packages you can call your local functions by their natural name. E.g. it may be "my-package::string-split", but because it is only used within "my-package" it can always be referred to as "string-split".

Which is a failure in RMS, not in CL packages or the notion of namespaces.

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