Re: Splitting GNU ELPA

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 18 May 2020 23:55:51 -0400
> 
>   > My opinion on these matters means very little, but FWIW I basically
>   > agree with what Stefan wrote.
> 
> Your opinion matters, but Stefan has said many things and I don't
> recall them all precisely.  I may not even have seen all those messages.
> 
> Could you restate the position you agree with?

Here's what Stefan said about this:

  FWIW, I'm not too fond of such shorthand syntax.  The benefit is not
  very high and it makes the language that much more difficult to learn
  for newcomers.

  For a programming language like Closure, it might make sense, since
  most/all people writing Closure programs are actual programmers that
  have to be proficient in Clojure.  But Elisp lambdas are very common in
  .emacs files, so this additional complexity will be exposed to some of
  our users who aren't programmers or aren't proficient in Elisp.

  [ Yes, I know it may sound strange coming from me, since I'm to blame
    for a lot of complexity in Elisp :-(
    But to my defense, `pcase` and `cl-defmethod` aren't nearly as often
    needed in .emacs as lambdas.  ]

  I can already see the discussions in forums about "what's the difference
  between #(f % 1) and (lambda (x) (f x 1))", "when should I use which",
  ...

  If we want to shorten anonymous functions we could start with something
  like (λ (x) (f x 1)), which you can get with
  prettify-symbols-mode already.