Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Po Lu]

조성빈 <address@hidden> writes:

> I personally think that various Emacs APIs regarding buffers, etc… is not
> part of the language, but that’s just my opinion.

They're implemented inside the language runtime, have relavant
primitives inside the bytecode engine, et cetera.  They're also the
primary (I wouldn't go as far as to say only, but it's close) IO
mechanism available in Emacs Lisp.

> No, people shouldn't need to learn a new language to use an editor.
> In the ideal world, normal people should be able to use package.el and
> custom.el to use Emacs without much fuss, and some people that is
> interested in can develop packages.

Indeed, normal people can do exactly that even today.  The point I'm
making here is that learning Emacs Lisp itself will let you extend
Emacs, and that there's no extra "Emacs API" to learn.

> It’s just that Emacs practically needs configuration to be usable - which
> means that one must learn Emacs lisp.
>
> Yes, Eintr teaches Emacs Lisp well, but that step should be optional.

And it is optional; You can go by with package+custom fairly well.  I
know people who do that.