Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Taylan Ulrich Bayirli/Kammer]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> It was you who stated that you considered it likely that LilyPond was
> not given any support of GUILE developers because of me being a persona
> non grata.

That's not "revenge."

> As there will be "no pressure" from the GUILE side once they decide
> Emacs becomes too inconvient to support.

"Not gonna happen." :-)

> Not particularly hard to guess since I pointed _out_ that there was
> something fishy.

Your attitude?  I must have missed that.

> Emacs is the platform for an ecosystem supporting thousands of packages.
> That requires a rather high level of compatibility.

Bug reports welcome.  (With as little insults as possible.)

> While you have ventured to say that you consider the move to Guile-Emacs
> as less disruptive as that to lexical binding, you have glossed over the
> fact that lexical binding has to be _explicitly_ enabled on a
> file-by-file basis, meaning that old code will run unchanged and with
> dynamic bindings.

Lexical binding changes language semantics, Guile-Emacs doesn't.

> One cannot help the impression that there is a certain elasticity to the
> claims of what will be possible under which conditions that make them
> less than useful for long-range planning.

Consider the following: the name of this thread is "Emacs Lisp's
future", and people talked about all sorts of changes to Elisp itself
that they would like.  And we two here are pondering whether Guile-Emacs
*might* end up causing some *minor* changes to Elisp.
(Backwards-incompatibilities rather; new features might be plenty.)

> Brad's status report in contrast was rather to the point, and the web
> page at <URL:http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo> paints a
> more realistic picture of the current situation as well.

Do you see any points there that mention incompatibilities between Emacs
Elisp and Guile Elisp semantics?

> At the current point of time, it definitely appears that the marketing
> department should not fear being overtaken by the engineering
> department, even though the latter is making solid progress.

I think the marketing department you have in mind consists of me, who is
not exactly a Guile developer.  *Hangs head in shame.*  Sorry that my
enthusiasm over Guile-Emacs and a more unified GNU system have annoyed
you; no reason to accuse Guile of marketing.  Give me all the blame.

I might not reply to further mails though.

Taylan