Re: Emacs learning curve

[Tom]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

> I already wrote long ago in this thread that to make Emacs more
> attractive, we need to add to it hot new features that target software
> developers.  

And why not add these by simply reusing the work of others?


The most requested and popular features are code
completion, refactoring and such. I know CEDET can do some of
these, but I wonder if Emacs should harness the effort put into
these areas by other development teams.

Take a look at the screenshots IdeBridge for example:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/IdeBridge


It uses SharpDevelop libraries to provide completion. I know a
pure elisp solution would be the best, but given the plethora of
languages it's not a realistic goal to provide a comprehensive
Elisp backend solution for everything due to limited developer
resources.

The best approach may be to provide a standard code
completion (refactoring, documentation lookup, etc.) frontend in
Emacs into which any backend implementation can be
plugged. People would write bridge code like in the above example
to handle communication between the frontend and the selected
backend. There are no licensing issues, because it can work
with process communication.

If only Emacs is installed on the machine the default backend
could be CEDET, but if, for example, Eclipse is installed then
the user could configure Java completion to use the Eclipse
backend instead if it provides more complete code analysis than
CEDET. Or .NET libraries for .NET

Why should Emacs reinvent everything in Elisp when it can stand
on the shoulder of other development teams?