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

[João Távora]

On Thu, Nov 9, 2023 at 3:05 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > that I didn't care to take a look at in a reasonable time frame?  More
> > importantly, to what extent are you and others significantly or often
> > hindered by the style I use there?
>
> I said nothing about your style.  Neither do I doubt that you know
> your own code very well.  We all know our own code well.  I'm asking
> you not to judge the burden of the maintainers in maintaining code
> they didn't write nor even see, until you get to our place and do it
> for a while.

Okay, and what I tried to say is that I _do_ have a valid judgement
of exactly this burden, to some quite significant degree, because not only
do I maintain "my" code, I have to wade through a lot of code that
I didn't write.  I didn't write any of icomplete.el and yet managed
to significantly enhance it, for example.  Or elisp-mode.el, or
minibuffer.el.  Or flymake.el, which I rewrote, backward compatibly.
Or eldoc.el, where I did likewise.  Or electric.el or so many other
pieces of code I have to visit and read to make sense of Emacs.
These aren't trivial files they're much larger.  I go
wherever M-. takes me.

So I have to read and understand lots of "alien" code in styles that
wouldn't be my first preference if I had written it from scratch,
often styles that lead to many "blerghs" and "yucks" which I know
we all do.  And sometimes that alien code was written by myself a
longer time ago.

And what I'm trying to say is that all those difficulties are much
much less importnat than shortcomings in domain knowledge.

> Only then you will be able to realize the role of
> obscure programming style and use of unfamiliar syntax in making the
> job harder than it has to be.

I am prepared to admit that that impact is heavier to someone
like you who is the first responder for any and every report to
parts of Emacs you didn't even know existed.  But I don't think
a uniform programming style, if that even exists (let alone
being feasible to enforce) would make your job much easier.

Maybe _somewhat_ easier, but to what loss?  Aggravated contributors,
endless hair-splitting of what exactly good style is.   And style
preferences change anyway: what I "liked" 10 years ago is not what
I like now. It's really a bad idea.

But it's definitely a good idea to review any _new_ contributions to
basic Elisp constructs clearly.  I'm not proposing a free-for-all.

I've said this often without any kind of irony or sarcasm that I think
you're an excellent maintainer.  This is not to "butter you up": I want
you to be happy maintaining Emacs for a long time.  IMHO, if I am allowed,
you should keep doing what you do, which is try to ping the specialists
in each domain, and prompt non-specialists too like you did with
bug#66970, to which I hope to have provided at least the start of
a fix.

João Távora