News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others. Parent comment

Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others by l0stman on Friday April 09, 2010 @03:17AM (#1252118)
To be fair, the part of Emacs implemented in Lisp looks nothing like poetry. I wouldn't qualify it as ``utter crap'' but it's a lot messier than I thought. Some of the default packages looks like straight C code translated verbatim to Lisp.

My take is that even if it's easier to screw things up in C, that doesn't mean that if you program in a higher level language, you'd automatically produce elegant code.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others by eru on Friday April 09, 2010 @07:57AM (#1252413)
Emacs Lisp is a mess. It doesn't even have lexical scoping.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others by jrockway on Friday April 09, 2010 @04:16PM (#1253750)
The development version does.

I can tell you, though, that this doesn't really matter in real life. The compiler warns you when you use a free variable, so it's pretty hard to accidentally misuse a dynamic variable. There are pathological cases that people point out, but these rarely matter in elisp that most people actually write.

Programming Emacs is a little different from programming other systems, but once you use its idioms instead of the ones you took from your favorite language, everything works quite nicely.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others by eru on Friday April 09, 2010 @08:00PM (#1254214)
Oh, it's not so much a problem of using a free variable by accident--where the compiler can help you out--but of not being able to use proper closures.

I agree that emacs lisp can still be used to productively write software. People put up with much worse things.

[ Parent | on HN ]