Comment by lispm

13 years ago

As a Lisp implementation Emacs Lisp was pretty primitive then:

    * primitive GC
    * only dynamic binding (Stallman sold that as a feature)
    * no nested functions
    * no threads
    * no object system
    * no namespaces for symbols
    * implementation not independent from the editor
    * no TCO
    * slow

On the positive side it already had a simple byte code interpreter with a compiler for it and it was fast enough for some editing. Also, dedicated Emacs Lisp users managed to write some amazing code - given the restrictions.

The 'eight megabytes and constantly swapping' thing now is also of less importance. ;-)

5 comments

lispm

bitdiddle 13 years ago

Emacs, imho, will get a whole lot better when it runs on Guile[1]. This was a great presentation. I've been using emacs since the mid-eighties, it's so easily programmable that hackers are always hacking new things for it, so it keeps up with the latest fashion.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-07/msg0006...

aryastark 13 years ago
Not sure about that. Guile is pretty old and messy itself. It's still my preferred Scheme, though. But that's mostly just because of familiarity and loyalty on my part.
There is already Edwin, which comes with MIT-Scheme. It's Emacs written in Scheme. It never took off, and most don't even know about it.
- rml 13 years ago
  
  I love Edwin! It's my favorite Emacs implementation, even though I don't get to use it as much as I'd like. It even has a nice email client, IMAIL, written using a beautiful object-oriented style. Many years of Scheme wizardry lives in there, I need to spend more time studying it.
kenko 13 years ago

Whoa, is that really happening? It seems as if people having been talking about it/pushing for it for ages.

jff 13 years ago

Does it have any of these things today? I ask of genuine interest. I've been bitten pretty often by the lack of threading.