Re: Casting as wide a net as possible

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2015-12-10, at 20:02, John Wiegley <address@hidden> wrote:

>>>>>> Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> My only point is that Lisp features really do make Emacs what it is. To
>> point out what Emacs is necessarily means pointing out some of those
>> features (IMO).
>
> I agree. The things that make Emacs great:
>
>   1. Highly consistent syntax.
>   2. Self-documenting.
>   3. Integrated debugger.
>   4. Ability to re-evaluate functions in a running environment.
>      (i.e., everything that made Lisp Machines great)
>   5. Natural syntax for scoping resources (`with-temp-buffer ...')
>   6. Large and well documented API
>   7. Stable and mature concepts evolved over decades
>   8. Huge, HUGE community of cargo-cultable examples, for those just learning

9. Lots and lots of functions to peform common (and even not-so-common)
tasks in an automated way.  (transpose-.*, I'm looking at you!)

10. Lots of well-thought-of functions, resulting from gathering over
three decades of experience: if you _want_ Emacs to be able to do
something useful (however small or big), it probably already can.  (See
beginning-of-buffer with a prefix arg, for instance.)

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University