Re:Emacs: The most successful malleable system
by Myrmornis on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @03:31PM
(#22881996)
It's more complicated than that: Emacs packages should be thought of the same as any other language's packages. They might comprise multiple files, and it's possible that their performance will be noticeably compromised if they are not byte-compiled. Installing Emacs packages should be done with the package manager.
There should be nothing stopping someone just copying and pasting an entire elisp source text from a website into scratch, evaluate the buffer on the spot, and have the exact same functionality as installing the package would.
I'm not saying that retrieving an external package isn't easier, but due to emacs' nature there isn't really sort of delineation based on how the elisp got into the emacs.