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

[Gerd Möllmann]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Gerd Möllmann <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com>
>> Cc: joaotavora@gmail.com,  michael_heerdegen@web.de,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2023 19:07:59 +0100
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > It isn't like we as a project never made any mistakes, but there's no
>> > reason to assume this decision is one of them until we have ample
>> > evidence.
>> 
>> Seq is 10 years in Emacs
>
> It is preloaded only since a little more than a year ago.

You're saying that the real promotion of seq is only a year old?
And that things will "improve" once the promotion picks up speed?

>> its polymorphism is unused in the tree.
>
> Searching for seq-* in the tree brings more than 590 hits in more than
> 170 Lisp files.

And? The polymorphism isn't used.

>> Joao showed that it's slow.
>
> No, he didn't.

Aha.

>> Dmitry mentioned that it is not a full replacement for what is in
>> cl-lib.
>
> Indeed, it is not a full replacement, and was never meant to be.  I
> believe its name says that much.
>
>> Po Lu mentioned the poor doc strings.
>
> That can be said about a lot of functions in Emacs, unfortunately.
> Including cl-lib, btw.  Which doesn't preclude us from using any of
> those poorly-documented functions.

I guess people like Alan will like that. Not only will he have to cope
with another set of poor doc strings, he will also have to cope more and
more with a new interface, while the old one won't go away.

Anyway, I'm not fighting against seq/map, should someone get that
impression. Live and let live.

But until someone can be bothered to make concrete arguments why generic
functions at this level make sense at all, and especially at this basic
level of the language, I think this is all useless and a mistake.

(And yes this is intentially provocative :-). I've lost hope to hear
something concrete a while ago.)