Re: Nano-improvements

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 19:58:44 +0400
> From: Dmitry Antipov <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> On 07/03/2014 06:53 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > I didn't say "we don't need nano-improvements".  I said they should
> > take a backseat to more substantial improvements in functionality,
> > especially user-visible functionality.
> 
> IMO all of this friction just comes from the different views on what
> Emacs is.

I don't think so.  But if it's true, then perhaps we could benefit
from asking the project lead to express their vision of what are the
project goals, both near-term and long-term, and what are non-goals.

> If this is just an editor, you're absolutely correct. But if
> someone treats it as a unique Lisp runtime system which can do a lot of
> interesting things beyond evaluating s-expressions, an opposite
> conclusions are much more likely. For example, what is more important -
> a) ability to edit huge files without loading all data into memory or
> b) JIT compiler from byte code to native code? If we're developing
> just an editor, a) is much more important, at least to match the
> proprietary competitors like SlickEdit; but if we're developing the
> language for the specific problem domain (and want to extend this
> domain as our language becomes more and more faster), b) can be a step
> to a lot of impressive opportunities.

I think all of the above is important; they are by no means
"nano-improvements".

I'm saying that there are too few changes in any of the
above-mentioned areas (and then some).  So their relative importance
is not the issue, because they all currently eat dust, while most of
our energy is applied elsewhere.