Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[chad]

On 18 Feb 2014, at 19:55, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

So you are saying that patch review process is that "red tape" that
was mentioned earlier?  If so, all the projects I'm involved with
insist on the "dialog", i.e. that the original contributors improve
and fix their contributions until they are acceptable. 

To some degree, but (my impression is that) Emacs stops a lot of

changes at the need for support on more platforms than the submitter

can easily develop on.  Note that Im not saying that these are

unreasonable - just that theyre not based on github.

Which projects don’t?

Most software projects today are much smaller, more nimble, and

piecemeal-clockwork than emacs. Emacs was built in a heavily

monolithic era, and continues with most of that lineage. Far more

software projects today are assembled from many interlocking pieces

of libraries, middleware, and plugin code. Again, there are good

reasons for this, but it has a cost, and much of that cost is

expressed as a high barrier to entry.

Compare this to typical java, python, or ruby projects; they usually

use a variety of smaller, self-contained projects, each of which

is a viable entry point for a new contributor. To the extent that

Emacs uses libraries, its often more hindrance than help, as the

new contributor is faced with X, GTK, ns/OpenStep, and w32 libraries,

or learning the daunting Emacs internal wrappers for each.

Another thing that hits Emacs: people working on changing or extending

Eclipse do it IN java, which is the same language they use Eclipse

FOR. While there are surely Emacs developers using Emacs to develop

Emacs Lisp, theyre doing so mostly just for Emacs, not for anything

else; this internal focus shows in the results. There was a time

when Emacs was a great way to write C code, but its really fallen

behind in some key areas, and Emacs own C code is highly idiosyncratic.

Again, Im aware that there are good reasons for all of these things

to be true, but each of them makes it harder for people to make

significant contributions to Emacs, which is the topic at hand.

I hope that helps,

~Chad