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

[Emanuel Berg]

Sebastián Monía wrote:

> 1. This kind of thread is more "scary" to potential Emacs
>    contributors than any degree of complexity in cl-lib.
>    I can confirm that.

Very true! It is alienating to newcomers but also to
experienced people who have solved problem with cl-lib in
Emacs and saw no problem with that, on the contrary, they used
what they thought was the best way to do it.

> 2. There's a lot of vague arguments for and against the
>    library that, as an semi-outsider, read more like
>    stylistic preference. Sometimes familiarity, or lack of
>    it. Few objective reasons for/against.

Again, true. In particular, what is lacking is whatever the
alternative would be. If cl-lib has increased the general
complexity, fine, maybe that is a problem to some. But surely
it is totally impractical to kick it out and for the vast
majority of the places where it is used we can't make the case
not using it will improve the quality of that code on
a case-by-case basis.

> 3. Anyone interested in writing code for Emacs has to make
>    the leap to a Lisp (elisp, in this case) which is already
>    quite alien to a large population. For non-programmers,
>    the problem is indistinguishable from learning any other
>    language. Even for most people familiar with software
>    development, cl-lib is the least of their difficulties.

Very true, there is no huge leap from Elisp not including
cl-lib to Elisp including cl-lib. If used well, cl-lib will on
the contrary reduce the complexity and make the code cleaner.
And in very complicated cases, as we have seen with some
examples of `cl-loop', it is not clear in any way that
re-writing that in any other style would reduce complexity.
On the contrary `cl-loop' can be seen as a handy frame where
all that complexity, when encountered, is neatly organized
and accessible.

At the very least, the people who used cl-lib and cl-loop and
every thing else cl- that they used, they didn't agree that
use was detrimental to anything, style or functionality.
And they solved their problems! In general, we should trust
them, and in particular, we should absolutely not alienate
them or anyone else for no reason other than style issues that
other people have on their contributions to Emacs.

We shipped the library, people used it, that's the situation.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal