Comment by winestock
15 years ago
The Lisp Curse does not mean that incompatible libraries exist. The Lisp Curse means that it's so easy for individual hackers to go their own way that getting them to cooperate resembles herding nuclear submarines (i.e., they all need to respect the same formidable power, there'll be plenty of internal politics, et cetera).
My opinion of Emacs being obsolete is one which I got from reading James Gosling, the author of the first Emacs that ran on Unix. I trust that he knows a thing or two on the matter and he didn't rest on his laurels after moving on. Besides, his description of Emacs matches the evidence of the senses.
The alternatives which you mention demonstrate the Lisp Curse rather than refute it, judging from their websites. Climacs doesn't seem to have been updated in nearly three years. Portable Hemlock doesn't seem to have updated in nearly seven years. MCLIDE is Macintosh only. Those three projects are either moribund or unportable, as predicted by the Curse.
> My opinion of Emacs being obsolete is one which I got from reading James Gosling, the author of the first Emacs that ran on Unix. I trust that he knows a thing or two on the matter and he didn't rest on his laurels after moving on. Besides, his description of Emacs matches the evidence of the senses.
So in other words, you have no direct experience with Emacs to compare it to whatever other programming environments you may or may not have used.
Thank you for wasting our time.
> My opinion of Emacs being obsolete is one which I got from reading James Gosling, the author of the first Emacs that ran on Unix.
Mind you he wrote an Emacs in C, complete with a faux-lisp interpreter. That more or less precludes him from being an expert in Emacs.
Keep also in mind he gave Java to the world, some would argue, well after it was obsolete (some people will sustain that Smalltalk 80 made Java obsolete in the early 80's, a full decade before its launch)
Writing Emacs, be it in C or whatever, is hardly a reason to not call Gosling an expert in Emacs, quite the contrary! But you might argue his approach to Emacs is not idiomatic or not consistent with the community and so on, if there is evidence for that.