Re: About Emacs Modernisation Project

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Bernardo Barros <bernardobarros@gmail.com> writes:

> I was reading about this topic on the group homepage. One thing I
> though was how Emacs is really great because of Emacs Lisp, since it
> is a real programming language and an text editor at the same time.
> But maybe one of the reasons that Emacs is not so popular nowadays is
> that Lisp itself is also not so popular anymore either. Someone told
> something about less than 1%.
>
> I have just checked the Pymacs project [http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/
> PyMacs] and I though to myself: "oh, that's a nice one, I could use
> Python instead of elisp to extend Emacs, I would like that a lot!".
> I'm a young guy and I don't work with lisp languages at all except
> when I use Emacs and Lilypond (a music notation program).
>
> But it seems to me that PyMacs is not a mature project yet, I would
> like to see this as a major version of Emacs. Maybe this is the way
> for Emacs 24 or 25? :-)

Lisp is a great language to implement compilers and interpreters with,
including of other, very different  languages.

If you would like to customize, or have your users customize, emacs in
a different  language than emacs lisp,  then you can  use or implement
easily such a different language in emacs lisp.

For example, there's ejacs, implementing javascript in emacs lisp.

There's emacs-cl, an implementation of Common Lisp in emacs lisp.

There's cl-python, an implementation of Python in Common Lisp, that
you could run on emacs-cl.

And several others I don't know or that I don't recall.


It's true that in all these cases, these packages would need some love
and further integration with emacs (the editor functions library) to
make them really usable.  

It is true also that it would be much easier to import various things
such as these other languages in emacs if it was written in Common
Lisp, because there are more of these things written in Common Lisp
than in emacs lisp (which indeed, sounds restricted to, well, emacs).
Unfortunately, this is not the direction taken by emacs' authors; but
there are emacsen written in Common Lisp (eg. Porable Hemlock and
Climacs, amongsts several others).


And don't be affraid of stacking VM over VM, we've got hundreds of
core nowadays in GPU, tomorrow in CPU! :-)


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com