Re: What's missing in ELisp that makes people want to use cl-lib?

[João Távora]

On Thu, Nov 9, 2023 at 1:46 PM Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:

> This is self-evidently wooden language.

And all the time I thought I was being cheerful.

> I expect the likes of
> "compartmentalizing a program for policy-making" from suits, not from
> free software developers.

Are _you_ the suit?  I missed the point of most of your very
elegant text, but isn't policy-making exactly what you (and I) are
trying to do, i.e. discourage some things and encourage others?

What's the gripe with compartments?  We don't have all of Elisp in
a single library?  I was talking about namespaces by the way,
if you didn't catch the reference (admittedly obscure)

Also, is really cl-set-difference to take the difference
of two sets worse than writing a "hallowed" multi-line
construct??  Maybe I'm not seeing what the construct is, so
what is your preferred Elisp hallowed way to take the
difference of two sets, say make a list  that contains
all items that appear in LIST1 but not LIST2?  Or to find
the index of a certain element of a sequence...

These comparisons, taken one by one, are the hard evidence of that
allows us to determine what is "alien" or not, not theological
consecrations of personal tastes of a given group, _any_ group.
For example, I don't think your 'nconc'  form is more readable
than 'cl-list*'.  It's slightly less readable IMO.  We could alias
`list*` to nconc though, even better.  But I can agree it's not
worth requiring cl-lib.el just for cl-list* alone.

Much like you prefer setcar to rplacd. Which I also do, btw.  But
I prefer (setf (car ...))  even more.  But you'll frequently see
me using setcar and setcdr (or even rplacwahtevercannevertypeit)
if that's the style of the file I'm working on.  Because I too
have my personal tastes, but contrary to others I can let go of
them without too much fuss.

Stefan M's pcase in particular is great.  Its docstring is tough,
I agree, and could use some examples (I always end up grepping
for examples).  But that macro is a lifesaver.

The way you talk about seq.el and pcase.el makes me think you
want to ban _all the things_, not just cl-lib.  I'm confused about
what you want Elisp code in core to look like.

João