Ramin Honary on Nostr: npub197lln…9rmtn > "I lament the day in 1994 when #Netscape executives ordered ...
npub197llnzpwfsg9h3mjcre307caj8mh8ea7v55395635qlu6qq6fd9q99rmtn (npub197l…rmtn)
> "I lament the day in 1994 when #Netscape executives ordered #BrendanEich to dump #Scheme and design a new, Java-like scripting language that became The Abominable #JavaScript."
> "Had Scheme been allowed to drive the browser as Eich originally intended, a cousin of #Emacs would be running the #Web today."
I also lament that day. Every time I see code with this "asyncCall().then(doThis()).then(doThat())...", knowing we could have had macros like "cut" to make it easier to write, I feel a sense of violent rage.
To be fair though, Emacs has had 30 years or so now to improve itself to become more of a general purpose Lisp app platform like the World Wide Web has. But for whatever reason they have not. I don't mean their archaic keybindings, I mean, by now Emacs could have had something like a Document Object Model, layout widgets, canvas widgets, primitives for blitting pixmaps to arbitrary parts of the view. But they don't have these things, and so they remain in the past.
I say this as someone who uses Emacs for more than 90% of my working day, every day. The day I find a Lisp-based programming environment with an Editor as good as Emacs, I am switching to that. There are a few candidates (Lem, TeXMacs, Hemlock) but they all have problems that make them not usable to me.
Guile Scheme has Emacs Lisp emulation, so maybe if someone writes an editor GUI on top of that (which I am trying to do but don't have time to make much progress), they could provide the first Emacs clone that actually runs legacy Emacs Lisp code.
> "I lament the day in 1994 when #Netscape executives ordered #BrendanEich to dump #Scheme and design a new, Java-like scripting language that became The Abominable #JavaScript."
> "Had Scheme been allowed to drive the browser as Eich originally intended, a cousin of #Emacs would be running the #Web today."
I also lament that day. Every time I see code with this "asyncCall().then(doThis()).then(doThat())...", knowing we could have had macros like "cut" to make it easier to write, I feel a sense of violent rage.
To be fair though, Emacs has had 30 years or so now to improve itself to become more of a general purpose Lisp app platform like the World Wide Web has. But for whatever reason they have not. I don't mean their archaic keybindings, I mean, by now Emacs could have had something like a Document Object Model, layout widgets, canvas widgets, primitives for blitting pixmaps to arbitrary parts of the view. But they don't have these things, and so they remain in the past.
I say this as someone who uses Emacs for more than 90% of my working day, every day. The day I find a Lisp-based programming environment with an Editor as good as Emacs, I am switching to that. There are a few candidates (Lem, TeXMacs, Hemlock) but they all have problems that make them not usable to me.
Guile Scheme has Emacs Lisp emulation, so maybe if someone writes an editor GUI on top of that (which I am trying to do but don't have time to make much progress), they could provide the first Emacs clone that actually runs legacy Emacs Lisp code.