Evolution of Emacs Lisp [pdf] (opens in new tab)

Some of the things you mention are also discussed in the linked paper. For example, quoting from Section 8.11 (Module system):

"... other than inertia one of the main arguments in favor of the status quo was that Elisp’s poor man’s namespacing makes cross-referencing easier: any simple textual search can be used to find definitions and uses of any global function or variable ... "

A few of the issues you mention can likely be improved, or resolved by using a better abstraction, or by deprecating features that are no longer needed. The Emacs community is typically very responsive and willing to discuss many issues in great detail. For example, if you run into performance issues or missing features, you can use Emacs itself to file a bug report, using:

    M-x report-emacs-bug RET

As an example for switching abstractions and also addressing one of your points, I find that working on strings can be extremely frustrating and error-prone, both in Elisp and also in other languages. In Emacs, it is often much more convenient to work on buffer contents instead. So, to perform complex string operations in Elisp, I often spawn a temporary buffer (with-temp-buffer), insert the string, and then perform the necessary modifications on the buffer content. A significant advantage of this is that I can use common editing operations such as moving forward or backward by several lines or characters. When done, I fetch the whole buffer content (using for example "buffer-string"), and use that as the result. In many cases, and especially if the data are logically structured, it is better to use Lisp forms instead of plain strings.

However, some of the basic things you mention are in my experience quite straight-forward. For example, with only a few lines of code, I can copy the front page of HN as HTML text (in fact, the whole HTTP response) into the current Emacs buffer:

    (let* ((host "news.ycombinator.com")
           (eol "\r\n")
           (proc (open-network-stream "HN" (current-buffer) host 443 :type 'tls)))
      (process-send-string proc
                           (format "GET / HTTP/1.1%sHost: %s%s%s" eol host eol eol)))

This automatically spawns a TLS connection, and I find this API quite convenient. I can then operate on the response as on any buffer content. Also, I can inspect the connection for example with list-processes, and many other functions. Spawning processes is quite similar, using for example start-process.

The great irony is that elisp, as with most of the languages of its venerable era, is not very good at processing text.

One of my emacs experiences is playing "escaping the regex" about once annually, where I need to use backslashes in a regex, but first have to escape an emacs string.

I'm not very good at elisp, so this is what a basic begineer regex looks like to escape a ' in a shell (so, I want the bash command to go from ' to \'). The regex in emacs I came up with was: (replace-regexp-in-string "'" "'\\\\''" $)

Now maybe there is some sort of shortcut for passing a string straight to a regex that will make me look silly, but for a text editor with emacs' power and flexibility to make a regex look that hard bought a smile to my face.

The phrase "what Clojure did for Common Lisp" reads awkwardly for me. What did Clojure do for Common Lisp?

I think most of these are supported through generic functions. Though, I think moving beyond alists is something you probably only ever have to do once you are doing some heavy lifting programs. In which case, I am curious if elisp is the best place to write that program.

I'm not sure we're using the same emacs lisp.

Your list of things that are painful in Elisp: working with lists and maps? For real? Opening files? `find-file is hard?

As for hard to find out how to accomplish basic things what about the extensive in-editor help system? C-h f for functions, C-h a for apropos and C-h i for info? It would be hard to find a better documented software system anywhere.

Sure you need a few libraries to make things better, but the fact that there is a healthy ecosystem of packages is a good thing.

Maps are fiddly in Common Lisp too, all the data structures feel a bit crufty compared to Clojure.

Elisp is being improved with every release. Lexical scoping was added without much ado; this release got concurrent threads, radix trees. It's not that broken we need to throw it away and start again. IMHO it's not broken at all.

Rewriting to modernize would effectively kill emacs lisp.

S, f, dash, ht are great 3rd party libraries that replace much of the legacy functionality.

> creating a modern implementation from scratch and it gaining some traction, basically what Clojure did for Common Lisp

it's not a new implementation - it's a fully incompatible new language. Zero CL code runs in Clojure because the operators are incompatible/different and any existing CL code needs to mostly re-architected, since Clojure has a very different approach (more functional, less object-oriented, less state, lazy data structures, no linked lists, hybrid libraries /language partly using hosted language, ...).

I believe there have been attempts at integrating GNU Guile (enabling the use of Scheme) into it and replacing ELisp going forward.

The project seem dead in the water though.

While I mostly agree that Elisp is fairly weak compared to other lisps, I should point out that it does support lexical scoping (and that is the recommend usage)

Vimscript was a mistake, if you ask me. The power of vi is its edit commands and the ability to bang text through shell commands. A very careful, considered expansion of a few features in vi to improve its integration with outside script interpreters (Perl, Python, etc.) as well as language servers could've produced an extremely compelling editor.

As it is, I've found that you can do a lot with just vi, tmux, and bash (along with all of the utilities).

Personally, I regard the reflective and introspective capabilities of Emacs as extremely powerful tools for learning more about Elisp and the entire environment.

For example, every time you press a key (or key sequence) that results in any action, Emacs internally invokes a function (most of them written in Elisp, some of them in C) that achieves this action. So, when you want to automate a task and have a rough idea how to achieve it by pressing key sequences, you can inspect their associated functions and their source code, and study how they are called and even how they do it.

As a quick start, you can—using Emacs itself!—display a list of all functions that are bound to any key sequence. To get this, simply press:

    C-h b

This gives a good first indication of which functions are important for editing, because functions that are very frequently needed are typically available via a predefined key sequence.

But then, your next question may be: What did C-h b actually do? That is, which function did this actually invoke? Of course, one straight-forward way is to simply search for "C-h b" in the buffer that shows all these key bindings, because you know it must appear there. Another way is to use C-h k C-h b.

But then, what did C-h k actually do?

To find out, we apply C-h k to its own key binding:

    C-h k C-h k

and from this, you see that C-h k internally invokes the Elisp function "describe-key".

At this point, it is essential that you also have the (Elisp) source code installed. If you have it, then you can simply browse the Elisp definition of describe-key, and see how it achieves its task.

The same goes for every other function you may be interested in: You can browse its definition, copy it (for example) into the scratch buffer, change it, evaluate it and run it. You will find that not much is needed to get started with Elisp, because many tasks can simply be written as a sequence of standard commands of which C-h b provides a good first overview. You can also press C-h l to get a list of the last few input keystrokes and the invoked commands.

In addition to that, to automate simple tasks in Elisp, you often only need a few simple commands that let you fetch text from any position in the buffer and to insert it (see for example the functions buffer-substring-no-properties and insert), the ability to launch external processes (the "Processes" chapter in the Elisp info documentation is great) and a way to perform editing operations in a temporary buffer (see with-temp-buffer). To find out more about these functions, simply use C-h f.

And, of course, you can simply use C-h k C-h f to see what C-h f does!

One essential point: To make Emacs keybindings more convenient, I recommend to turn Caps Lock into an additional Ctrl key.

If you're not already a lisper I would recommend learning Common Lisp from one of the many excellent books. Learning the differences for Emacs Lisp afterwards is a breeze, and you get a much a more general purpose view of Lisp.

> The only thing really good about elisp is that it is integrated into Emacs.

But that's really, really good compared to most programs, which are customized by dialog boxes or INI files. Imagine how great it would be if you could script your web browser using some semi-decent programming language, and your scripts would work 30 years from now.

I think the implication is that once upon a time, Emacs had a comment/docstring which wasn't politically correct. Let the shunning or boycotting begin...

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Would you please not create accounts to do that with?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did not know about helm. I just installed it and I think that this alone might solve 75% of the problem, thanks!

As an example, let's say I'm new to elisp and I am wondering how to insert a character to a buffer. `apropos` "insert" just returns too much stuff. `heml-apropos` seems much better though, with a readable output. However, you still have to know that the function is named "insert", which you can spend lots of minutes on. In a Javascript parallel universe, there is a high probability that I would have done `console.log(buffer)` and I would have found the `buffer.appendChars()` method in seconds. You can quickly find what you can do with an object in Js/Python/PHP, but in elisp, I have yet to find.