> Suppose I want to work in a single place for all my contexts, both personal and professional.
This has always been my problem with adopting Emacs or Obsidian or any other app that purports to do this. Who are y'all working for that you can bring professional stuff onto the same system as personal stuff? I don't want my personal emails on my work computer, and my boss would be rather upset if I brought work emails onto my personal computer. I'd love one of these do everything apps that lets me tag and sync just stuff that ought to be synced.
I think his secondary point is to show the potential. His primary point is likely that if you set this all up for home use, you can use mostly the same config to use it at work. This way, when you go home or go to work, you're dealing with the same environment and workflows.
Maybe he is a freelancer or a business owner and not an employee. If you’re one of the former, there’s often little separation between work and personal. I only truly enforce separation when I’m an employee, with different devices for each context.
What do you mean by "richer ecosystem"? Have you ever seen GitHub language stats - there's so much Elisp on GitHub alone, it's absolute bananas. The amount of Elisp in the wild probably surpasses the amount of Clojure, CL and Racket combined. And mind that it isn't "a general use" PL - it exists for one and single purpose.
Lem is great and I'm happy there's finally something out there to challenge Emacs' hegemony, yet pragmatically, unless someone builds a way to run Elisp in Lem, it's unlikely to overthrow Emacs anytime soon, and that's just not gonna happen.
Org-mode, Magit, and thousands of packages aren't just "Elisp code" - they depend on Emacs' specific buffer model, text properties, overlays, markers, the display engine, process handling, and countless quirks packages rely on (intentionally or not). A Lem Elisp interpreter that didn't also reimplement all of that faithfully would run trivial `.el` files and choke on anything real. At that point you've reimplemented Emacs inside Lem.
Elisp is not the biggest point here and Neovim proves that with pivoting to Lua; the crux is the runtime and the corpus, and reimplementing those is the actual mountain. That is real ecosystem for whatever reason you're choosing to simply ignore.
Having CommonLisp as the extension language would indeed be a great improvement over Elisp.
However, I am suspicious about the dependency of Lem on Webkit, which for me is rather associated with inefficiency and low performance than with the instant reactions that I expect from programming text editors, terminal emulators and tiled window managers.
The main problem is that it is very difficult for any replacement of Emacs to offer everything that already exists for Emacs.
In my opinion, the only way in which such a replacement would succeed would be if it would include an automatic translator from Elisp to CommonLisp scripts executable by it, with equivalent functionality.
Lem can also render via ncurses, which works fairly fine if you don't need mouse support. It used to also have an SDL2 frontend, but it was deprecated for reasons I don't remember
Because you need Lisp. That's the actual "power of Emacs". Emacs is a Lisp-interpreter with a built-in text editor. Everything stems from that. Anyone challenging "the choice" of Lisp as the configuration language for an editor, saying things like: "Why? If X is better - faster, more modern, more popular...", etc., have misunderstanding of what makes Lisp so uniquely powerful.
A specific language is not the point - to implement anything similar to Emacs, you'd need a homoiconic language or at least a language that gives you live, reflective, late-bound image with code-as-data. Without that single aspect tons of things simply and inevitably (as history shows) will get complicated.
Why we have not seen such differentiator with VSCode? Because of their design choices - the extension language and the editor internals live in different worlds behind an API boundary. Emacs essentially has no such boundary. That's the power, and also a consequence of the image + homoiconicity combo.
As much as I don't like all the choices they've made, the choices have been the result of iterating on the problem space over time.
And... yeah the consent thing is messy. There's a kind of implicit consent in knowing that a user that does not consent can block scripts. But then it can quickly become coerced consent if there's some IRL reason you need to use the page and it absolutely does not work without JS.
That said, I'm a JS-webapp UI guy. Partly that's just what I've built my career on, largely because it was the new field emerging as I was coming up. I could learn things quickly and convert what I learned into a salary. But the second reason is that I'm disillusioned with HTML as the wire format for the web. If you choose to render HTML on your server, you're centralizing costs in a way that will eventually force you towards an extractive relationship with your users. Not only are you centralizing the cost of rendering and transmitting the HTML, but you're also centralizing the cost of building and maintaining the UI layer.
This is (partly) because HTML failed at being a semantic language. There was a brief flicker of hope with XML and XSLT -- for a hot second you could write a compact semantic document and send it over the wire. No longer...
I hate to tell ya this... LiveScript was renamed to JavaScript in 1995, and the first ECMAScript standard was published in 1997. So not 40 years old, but 31 years old.
NodeJS (liberating JavaScript from the browser) was first released in 2009... so again, not 40 years old, but old enough to have a drivers license.
I agree with you on the other side though: despite the language being relatively old and stable, it feels like the wheel's getting reinvented over and over again and "this will be a good enough pattern for the next decade" hasn't ever really shaken out, unlike Lisp or even Python.
What it could at least let you do is view JS code using more "Pythonic" syntax rendering. The semantics would still be JS, but you could get rid of the curly braces while you were reading it if you just preferred semantic indentation, for example
"Common Lisp Emacs" has been attempted a few times. Lem seems like the best effort yet, and I was really excited about it until they decided to adopt a webview renderer.
I am not sure if I would bet one way or another on who has the richer ecosystem here.. They are both great. I would probably wager elpa has more packages in general than quicklisp, but maybe not necessarily richer/higher quality.
GNU Emacs is probably the easiest way to capture the spirit of working on the Lisp machines. Interlisp is an ongoing project that takes you even further down that road.
It's a matter of philosophy; would you rather have multiple small apps that do only one job or one "super app" that does it all?
Ironically, starting from the former, I've now turned my tmux into the latter with so many utility apps integrated into it. But now I can see the benefits of each approach. Maintaining "super apps" is more challenging due to the coupling of so many pieces to each other.
And building a consistent good experience from isolated tools is even harder. The problem is just hard and I think good criteria with the super app approach is the way to go.
I really like Spacemacs. It's discoverable, extendable, quite consistent.
> And building a consistent good experience from isolated tools is even harder.
Yes, I agree, which is why my tmux slowly devours my numerous small utility apps into itself! I haven't tried Spacemacs yet, too Vim-pilled at the moment..
If we take a browser, and add things to make it a super app, we would basically get an extensible electron app, right?
Maybe, why not?
> Suppose I want to work in a single place for all my contexts, both personal and professional.
This has always been my problem with adopting Emacs or Obsidian or any other app that purports to do this. Who are y'all working for that you can bring professional stuff onto the same system as personal stuff? I don't want my personal emails on my work computer, and my boss would be rather upset if I brought work emails onto my personal computer. I'd love one of these do everything apps that lets me tag and sync just stuff that ought to be synced.
I think his secondary point is to show the potential. His primary point is likely that if you set this all up for home use, you can use mostly the same config to use it at work. This way, when you go home or go to work, you're dealing with the same environment and workflows.
Maybe he is a freelancer or a business owner and not an employee. If you’re one of the former, there’s often little separation between work and personal. I only truly enforce separation when I’m an employee, with different devices for each context.
Something like Lem[1][2] could go even further because of the richer CommonLisp ecosystem compared to Elisp one.
[1] https://lem-project.github.io/
[2] https://github.com/lem-project/lem
What do you mean by "richer ecosystem"? Have you ever seen GitHub language stats - there's so much Elisp on GitHub alone, it's absolute bananas. The amount of Elisp in the wild probably surpasses the amount of Clojure, CL and Racket combined. And mind that it isn't "a general use" PL - it exists for one and single purpose.
Lem is great and I'm happy there's finally something out there to challenge Emacs' hegemony, yet pragmatically, unless someone builds a way to run Elisp in Lem, it's unlikely to overthrow Emacs anytime soon, and that's just not gonna happen.
Org-mode, Magit, and thousands of packages aren't just "Elisp code" - they depend on Emacs' specific buffer model, text properties, overlays, markers, the display engine, process handling, and countless quirks packages rely on (intentionally or not). A Lem Elisp interpreter that didn't also reimplement all of that faithfully would run trivial `.el` files and choke on anything real. At that point you've reimplemented Emacs inside Lem.
Elisp is not the biggest point here and Neovim proves that with pivoting to Lua; the crux is the runtime and the corpus, and reimplementing those is the actual mountain. That is real ecosystem for whatever reason you're choosing to simply ignore.
Having CommonLisp as the extension language would indeed be a great improvement over Elisp.
However, I am suspicious about the dependency of Lem on Webkit, which for me is rather associated with inefficiency and low performance than with the instant reactions that I expect from programming text editors, terminal emulators and tiled window managers.
The main problem is that it is very difficult for any replacement of Emacs to offer everything that already exists for Emacs.
In my opinion, the only way in which such a replacement would succeed would be if it would include an automatic translator from Elisp to CommonLisp scripts executable by it, with equivalent functionality.
Lem can also render via ncurses, which works fairly fine if you don't need mouse support. It used to also have an SDL2 frontend, but it was deprecated for reasons I don't remember
I chose the JS ecosystem. Why does the power of Emacs not belong in the browser? These days JS is a powerful enough FP language to do it.
Because you need Lisp. That's the actual "power of Emacs". Emacs is a Lisp-interpreter with a built-in text editor. Everything stems from that. Anyone challenging "the choice" of Lisp as the configuration language for an editor, saying things like: "Why? If X is better - faster, more modern, more popular...", etc., have misunderstanding of what makes Lisp so uniquely powerful.
A specific language is not the point - to implement anything similar to Emacs, you'd need a homoiconic language or at least a language that gives you live, reflective, late-bound image with code-as-data. Without that single aspect tons of things simply and inevitably (as history shows) will get complicated.
Why we have not seen such differentiator with VSCode? Because of their design choices - the extension language and the editor internals live in different worlds behind an API boundary. Emacs essentially has no such boundary. That's the power, and also a consequence of the image + homoiconicity combo.
> to implement anything similar to Emacs, you'd need a homoiconic language
I've got that. It took 6 years but I developed a comprehensive homoiconic layer for Javascript
Nearly 40 years of stuff.
People iterating on a problem space over time is the best way we have found to improve things.
The JS ecosystem is not that old and also attempts to solve hundreds of unrelated problems like running software without peoples consent.
As much as I don't like all the choices they've made, the choices have been the result of iterating on the problem space over time.
And... yeah the consent thing is messy. There's a kind of implicit consent in knowing that a user that does not consent can block scripts. But then it can quickly become coerced consent if there's some IRL reason you need to use the page and it absolutely does not work without JS.
That said, I'm a JS-webapp UI guy. Partly that's just what I've built my career on, largely because it was the new field emerging as I was coming up. I could learn things quickly and convert what I learned into a salary. But the second reason is that I'm disillusioned with HTML as the wire format for the web. If you choose to render HTML on your server, you're centralizing costs in a way that will eventually force you towards an extractive relationship with your users. Not only are you centralizing the cost of rendering and transmitting the HTML, but you're also centralizing the cost of building and maintaining the UI layer.
This is (partly) because HTML failed at being a semantic language. There was a brief flicker of hope with XML and XSLT -- for a hot second you could write a compact semantic document and send it over the wire. No longer...
> The JS ecosystem is not that old
I hate to tell ya this... LiveScript was renamed to JavaScript in 1995, and the first ECMAScript standard was published in 1997. So not 40 years old, but 31 years old.
NodeJS (liberating JavaScript from the browser) was first released in 2009... so again, not 40 years old, but old enough to have a drivers license.
I agree with you on the other side though: despite the language being relatively old and stable, it feels like the wheel's getting reinvented over and over again and "this will be a good enough pattern for the next decade" hasn't ever really shaken out, unlike Lisp or even Python.
I think I need to update my sales pitch for the passage of time. Emacs is probably closer to 50 now.
They told me the future would have horrors beyond my comprehension.
But I understand this particular horror. I might even agree... :D
Maybe python can't do it, but I would love to extend my editor (and even browser) using python.
My core idea, CSTML, isn't implementation-language-specific: https://docs.bablr.org/guides/cstml
What it could at least let you do is view JS code using more "Pythonic" syntax rendering. The semantics would still be JS, but you could get rid of the curly braces while you were reading it if you just preferred semantic indentation, for example
"Common Lisp Emacs" has been attempted a few times. Lem seems like the best effort yet, and I was really excited about it until they decided to adopt a webview renderer.
I've got vscode for that.
I am not sure if I would bet one way or another on who has the richer ecosystem here.. They are both great. I would probably wager elpa has more packages in general than quicklisp, but maybe not necessarily richer/higher quality.
GNU Emacs is probably the easiest way to capture the spirit of working on the Lisp machines. Interlisp is an ongoing project that takes you even further down that road.
It's a matter of philosophy; would you rather have multiple small apps that do only one job or one "super app" that does it all?
Ironically, starting from the former, I've now turned my tmux into the latter with so many utility apps integrated into it. But now I can see the benefits of each approach. Maintaining "super apps" is more challenging due to the coupling of so many pieces to each other.
If the "super app" is modular - like Emacs is - you basically get the best of both worlds.
And building a consistent good experience from isolated tools is even harder. The problem is just hard and I think good criteria with the super app approach is the way to go.
I really like Spacemacs. It's discoverable, extendable, quite consistent.
> And building a consistent good experience from isolated tools is even harder.
Yes, I agree, which is why my tmux slowly devours my numerous small utility apps into itself! I haven't tried Spacemacs yet, too Vim-pilled at the moment..