Re: What's missing in ELisp that makes people want to use cl-lib?

[Po Lu]

João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:

> Where in heck did I "impugn" Emacs's Lisp primitives?? I use them
> all the time!!  I just think it's a really really bad idea to
> use them exclusively, almost religiously, to inline existing utils
> in write-only code.  When given the opportunity to demonstrate the
> superiority of this approach to substitute cl-set-difference, you
> failed.  It's just my opinion, of course, but that hard patent fact
> that is on display in this thread, along with the hard patent fact
> that I simply failed to notice your mistake -- because reading that
> code takes much more effort -- is a much better demonstration
> of the relative "abstrusity" of the practice you so energetically
> recommend.

That failure belies the alleged advantages of cl-lib, and vindicates all
Alan and Richard have said thus far: for all their augustness, cl-lib's
designers did not select an unambiguous English word for a comparatively
elementary set operation.  Instead devolving responsibility for second
guessing their intent to such as I and they.

> Like Dmitry, I don't think it's because you don't have
> coding ability or intelligence -- which you most clearly do --
> just that your practice lends itself to these problems _more often
> than_ other more eclectic and pondered practices such as using
> more programming techniques.

Actually, a problem would have arisen had I used cl-set-difference while
under the impression that it calculated the disjunctive union of LIST1
with LIST2, as the signification of the word "difference" suggests.

Writing such code with only primitives sidesteps such pitfalls
altogether, since what is thought is directly set down.