Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Posted October 8, 2014 by n8willis]

From:		Stefan Monnier <monnier-AT-iro.umontreal.ca>
To:		Taylan Ulrich Bayirli/Kammer <taylanbayirli-AT-gmail.com>
Subject:		Re: Emacs Lisp's future
Date:		Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:33:59 -0400
Message-ID:		<jwv8ulicg4l.fsf-monnier+emacs@gnu.org>
Cc:		Phillip Lord <phillip.lord-AT-newcastle.ac.uk>, emacs-devel-AT-gnu.org

> > Interoperability between languages is *hard*.  Doing it so the result
> > is lightweight and elegant (and moderately efficient) is rarely
> > possible.
> Well, the Elisp and Scheme integration is pretty great.

These are arguably very closely related languages, so it's a kind of
"best case" scenario.  And even in that scenario, there are significant
dark corners.

Of course, you can learn to program in "Emacs Scheme" fairly quickly
if you're familiar with Scheme, but it's not quite like programming
in Scheme.  And the docstrings can't be trusted because they point you
to Elisp macros you can't use.  And ...

Now, think about what would happen when trying to interoperate with JS,
Python, younameit, ...


        Stefan