That was the defining reason for me to switch from vim to emacs :) still have the date on my calendar and I celebrate my emacs-versary with M-x tetris :D

I still chuckle whenever someone tries to remake Emacs using Lua, completely missing the reason Emacs is so powerful is because it's written on a Lisp.

EDIT: looks like even in this thread people are suggesting to use Lua instead of elisp. smh

Kids that dismiss Lisp without even grasping the amazing power behind it, remind me the story of Yanomami languages of Amazonian tribes. Apparently, there's word for 'one' and for 'two', but there's no word for 'three', in their language, only a generic word that basically means 'a lot'.

Now imagine trying to explain to them the concept of subtracting a hundred from a billion and the most straightforward way to deal with that is a decimal numbering system. I think they'd kill you for blackmagicfuckery on the spot.

Well, if that comparison feels condescending, let's imagine ancient Romans - with all their sophisticated culture, economy and traditions. They wouldn't kill you, but still the idea of a number such a billion would probably terrify them. They'd probably be like: "dear sapientissime señore, we respect your wisdom, but we rather use... Lua"

Romans knew about thousand based multipliers with a mark over the letter.

Okay, please share your wisdom, tell me how would they express "1,000,000,000 - 100" using Latin numerals?

Oh, I found the answer on my own, with the help of LLM. For a billion you can use M̅M̅, which technically would mean a thousand thousand thousands, and to denote the calculation above you'd write - M̅M̅CM. But my point still remains relevant - this is the modern extended version of Roman numerals. In ancient Rome they typically never would go up to a billion.

Lua can be viewed as a pretty solid lisp dialect. You've got the compiler available at runtime, first class functions and coroutines, sensible language runtime. Type system is pretty much the same. It doesn't do the phase separated macros out of the box, but metalua does. Performance is rubbish and the syntax is a parse away from the s-expression ast but whatever, the semantics are right.

I mostly agree.

Probably Stallman would object that Lua doesn't have read (apart from eval) and print.

As for performance, LuaJIT performance is better than any Common Lisp or Elisp, and dramatically better than the first 35 years of Elisp, before native-code compilation.

Any common Lisp? SBCL is no turtle.

Compared to LuaJIT it is, unless you monomorphize and turn off safety checks, at which point you're basically programming in C with Lisp syntax.

There are plenty of powerful programmer editors, yes being mostly written in Lisp dialect makes it powerful, but also makes one lose too much time yak shaving instead of programming the actual task.

XEmacs, much better than Emacs back then, was my rescue for not having IDE culture back in my early UNIX days. We're talking back when Xenix and DG/UX would be known names to anyone working with UNIXes.

Nowadays, while Emacs key bindings and elisp might still be burned into my brain cells, I no longer reach out to it.