Re:The Emacs Problem (2005)
by agumonkey on Thursday February 27, 2014 @10:29AM
(#7312646)
All the things cited below are just a matter of libraries, things that I don't find particularly worthy, someone could reimplement them in Eclipse.
What Emacs gets by being an lisp based system, is a pervasive dynamic circularity that, Eclipse (among others) ~is far from enjoying[1]. Anything is a burden in Eclipse, the SDK is a maze of stateful randomly order objects[2]. You needed a book to have a menu action running your code.
In emacs it's one line, very declarative, very composable[3] and you're done. It's pretty and gets out of your way. Everything in Eclipse was over-engineered (plugin repos that takes minutes to actualize, so much for Java jitted static typing performance). The only joy you get is the surprise you actually got the elephant dancing.
This and the target miss. It was a reinvention of Visual Age but it lacks good user interaction basics (edition is very crude, hard to extend, snippets were a new shiny thing in 2007)
And now that elisp has lexical-scoping, you can enjoy functional idioms to the fullest (dash.el) making your eclipse plugin java code (prior 8) even harder to swallow.
[1] at least when I was quite messing with Eclipse (circa 2007) EMF, OSGi, Eclipse plugins, Eclipse SDK running in Eclipse.
[2] how many ways you can get a particular object, accessing things through indexes (myArray[0] is not a stable path to anything)
[3] write a simple function, wrap it in a command, wrap it in a menu or a keybinding. very iterative, layered ..
What Emacs gets by being an lisp based system, is a pervasive dynamic circularity that, Eclipse (among others) ~is far from enjoying[1]. Anything is a burden in Eclipse, the SDK is a maze of stateful randomly order objects[2]. You needed a book to have a menu action running your code.
In emacs it's one line, very declarative, very composable[3] and you're done. It's pretty and gets out of your way. Everything in Eclipse was over-engineered (plugin repos that takes minutes to actualize, so much for Java jitted static typing performance). The only joy you get is the surprise you actually got the elephant dancing.
This and the target miss. It was a reinvention of Visual Age but it lacks good user interaction basics (edition is very crude, hard to extend, snippets were a new shiny thing in 2007)
And now that elisp has lexical-scoping, you can enjoy functional idioms to the fullest (dash.el) making your eclipse plugin java code (prior 8) even harder to swallow.
[1] at least when I was quite messing with Eclipse (circa 2007) EMF, OSGi, Eclipse plugins, Eclipse SDK running in Eclipse.
[2] how many ways you can get a particular object, accessing things through indexes (myArray[0] is not a stable path to anything)
[3] write a simple function, wrap it in a command, wrap it in a menu or a keybinding. very iterative, layered ..