I would also love to see a new emacs based on Racket. Is rmacs by Tony Garnock-Jones intended to be a small project or is he meaning for it to grow to be a serious contender with emacs, vim, etc?
I agree with Greg that the ecosystem and momentum around emacs is its strongest point. I've written a couple small emacs packages, and in doing so I added myself to the watch list of the Melpa emacs package repository, and they probably average about 3 new packages per day. So rmacs would need a lot of momentum to be able to get many users. But I would love it. Just as long as doesn't try to throw out things like multiple frontends (IE runnable in both terminal and as an X window), and extensibility everywhere. (It's reasons like these that I believe Atom, Sublime, etc will never seriously compete) On Fri, Jul 03, 2015 at 11:39:38AM -0400, Greg Hendershott wrote:
So I've spent a lot of time using both Racket and Elisp over the past couple years. My feeling: - Racket is much nicer. - Elisp is not nearly as bad as I first thought. Some other baseless opinions: 1. An "opposite" approach would be to put a more Rackety face on Elisp. But. I feel it's probably helpful (and interesting) to know the real deal. I was excited to discover the dash.el package, which puts a Clojure-ish face on some things. Having said that, I'm now using it less. For example, I love using Racket match to do combined conditional and binding. I started using if-let from dash to do the equivalent in Elisp. Then I realized Emacs already provides pcase; so I'm simply using that these days. (Although not as comprehensive as Racket match, pcase is a frequently-used subset.) For another example, although I wish it were named filter, I can use cl-remove-if-not from the standard cl-lib package. I feel I ought to know it exists, and if I do, I may as well just use it? 2. I think the desired trade-offs can be different. For example in Clojure if I rename a function, the old definition still exists under the old name, ready to cause confusion. That's "too dynamic" for my taste, outside Emacs. But that dynamism is part of what makes the Emacs environment special. And anyway most (of my) Elisp code is doing tactical UX grunt work. So the cost:benefit seems different. 3. My impression is that there's been somewhat of an Emacs renaissance the last few years. Probably due to the new package manager, as well as a cohort of fresh packages like dash.el from new, younger folks. That entire "ecosystem" is what makes Emacs special, I think. Before embarking for real on a new project, not only does there need to be a story about supporting that, I think it would need to be totally seamless. Which is maybe not impossible but probably non-easy. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
