Subject: Re: "Well, I want to switch over to replace EMACS LISP with Guile." (was Re: Lisp in Python) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 15 Oct 2002 23:13:20 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3243712400608096@naggum.no> * Greg Neumann | From your tone about Free Software, I assume that people already tried | integrating CL well into Emacs... The one really useful thing about the Net is that you can ask people questions and not have to assume based on "tone" and other factors. Many still behave as if Usenet consisted of published papers where the author had gone fishing. Do not guess. Do not assume. Think and ask. Listen and learn. Voice your concerns directly. It takes too much time to read news already if one shall not also have to counter-act assumptions and all kinds of weird guesses based on feelings and tones. This may be a virtual reality of sorts, but it still consists only of what we verbalize. | I hear that esr actually called Gnu a cathedral of development instead of | a bazaar, so no doubt there is much to be disenchanted with Emacs | development. I'll look into that. FWIW, you should find my name on a large number of changelog entries and some packages. I sort of dropped out when MULE was dropped on the feet of all the Emacs developers. Many other long-time developers found that they had a very limited taste for the MULE team's doing and especially the undoing of previously working support for 8-bit character sets. The MULE team was sufficiently incompetent and destructive that I published a "multibyte survival kit" for Emacs 20.2. RedHat distributed it, but I think it was a sufficiently strong eye-opener that many problems got fixed. That was, in effect, a threat of secession and split based on the ill will and incompetence of a team that was widely believed to think that only the Japanese way to large character sets would work. To this day, the MULE-based Emacs really, really sucks at Unicode support. I have quit working with Emacs entirely and only use it, but what pushed me to this conclusion was the rank arrogance of the incompetent Japanese team. I had worked with character sets in ISO since before Unicode, but was met with what would probably be perceived as polite, but amazingly arrogant Japanese know-it-alls who probably did not understand English well enough to grasp what people were talking about, but too afraid to show their incompetence by asking questions, instead destroyed years of effort to make Emacs work well in Europe, too. It was an interesting experience in international cooperation and politics. It shall be fun to see if they ever manage to make Emacs truly Unicode-conformant and able to accept input from X with its rich support for many character sets. Emacs 21.2 is still, amazingly, unable to understand most X events that other "modern" X applications accept without problems, including a UTF-8- enabled xterm. There is, in my experienced view, not much hope for any /real/ improvements to Emacs unless they get rid of much braindamage, both people and code. I also wanted to build a Common Lisp-based Emacs and still have the domain name "clemacs.org", but found that after a couple months of spare-time work on it that the sheer amount of duplication of effort was going to kill the project before it was born, so I aborted the mission. None of the free Common Lisp were up to the task, either, by the way. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.