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

[Richard Stallman]

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  > > what constitutes "Emacs Lisp"?  It would
  > > seem peculiar if it were to be defined by the arbitrary decisions of the
  > > past, constrained by the contingent circumstances of the time.

  > Those "arbitrary decisions" are what got us to where we are now, 40
  > years later.  So some respect for those "arbitrary decisions" is due,
  > I think.

Not only that, but -- these decusions were not arbitrary in the first
place.  They were based on thought and embodied an idea of design.
That's why they add up to a coherent whole.

And yes, they add up to Emacs Lisp as it is -- "where we are now" is
the sum of them.

  > > 1. Not standardised; it is possible to extend the language without
  > >    having to worry about how many implementations will follow along

  > IMNSHO, extending Emacs Lisp as the language is not the main goal of
  > Emacs development.  Emacs Lisp is not a programming language on its
  > own, it is a language for implementing and extending features and
  > extensions in Emacs.

That is absolutely right!  But there is a second error in the point
(1) that you are responding to: the idea that extending a license is
good, that more complexity in the form of language constructs

Complexity of a language imposes a cost on all users of that language.
Sometimes the right choice is to refuse ti extend the language.

  > > Emacs Lisp can learn from interesting ideas that other
  > > languages provide, adapt and add them, making them available to
  > > everyone.

  > It certainly can.  The question is: should it?  Since we are not
  > driven by any standard, it is completely up to us to make those
  > decisions, and we should IMO make them judiciously and carefully,
  > taking the downsides into consideration.  In particular, I hope people
  > agree that making a language too large and complex is not a good
  > thing in the long run.

I think the same.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)