Re: Default lexical-binding to t

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2024 22:50:57 +0000
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> 
> But I do wonder whether the massive time and effort its development
> and proliferation have taken up were worth it.

This could be said about almost every major feature in Emacs that
fundamentally changes the internals.  Are the time, energy, and
massive efforts I invested (and am still investing) in bidirectional
editing support worth it?  I don't know; there are days when I think
it was all a terrible waste.  What about all the multiple changes in
the internals that bring us 3.7% speedup in some benchmark?  What
about support for Lisp threads?  What about the addition of positions
to symbols? in how many error-message situations is this really
important?  And XInput2, and touch devices, etc. etc.

Emacs moves forward because someone whom we trust to be an expert in
some area or to understand well enough what our users might want has
an itch to scratch, not because we have some magic future insight.
Hindsight is always 20-20, but it is also unfair, given our
development model and the pull of core developers and expertise that
we can command.