Re: Brand new clojure support in Emacs ;-)

[João Távora]

On Sun, Sep 3, 2023 at 5:53 PM Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com> wrote:

> To be clear, I am not advocating anything here other than recognizing
> the GNU emacs project's rights to use <language>-mode as a library
> name based on that project's use of that naming pattern for 40 years.
> I don't think any external party should feel they have trademark-type
> rights over such a functional name.

I happen to agree with you exactly on principle here.  But -- in reality
-- name clashes do occur and cause some headaches to users.  These
headaches are avoidable with careful craft and technical means, but
it's smart of Emacs maintainers to put this possibility aside at least
for the foreseeable future, until in Emacs 50 we have some kind of
decent namespacing solution (IMHO prefixing doesn't really count and
I don't see  how a system can keep growing and growing without one).

Furthermore the mere suggestion of such a naming clash has put some
people on edge and in a combat-mode, spinning the whole initiave into
some kind of hostile takeover of someone's else work, obviously
distracting for the much more challenging -- and interesting -- aspects
of developing a new major mode.  So in hindsight, my suggestion was a
big fat mistake.


João