steve yegge - the-emacs-problem
Lisp still doesn't seem like the right language for doing text manipulation, and nothing I've seen from the Emacs libraries is making me think any differently. It sure beats the hell out of Java though. Maybe someday someone will write Emacs using Ruby as the embedded interpreter...
These are all great points. I know exactly how he feels. I know soooo exactly how Charles feels that I decided to write a blog instead of an email reply. Because all the things he's brought up are real, bona-fide problems.
Let's start by considering the basic problem: how good is Lisp for text processing? That turns out to be a complicated question.
When we think of "text processing", most of us usually think immediately of regular expressions. Unless "we" are C++ programmers, in which case "we" like to write 2500-line clones of the Unix 'grep' utility whenever "we" need to do a text search — or so it would seem, from the candidates I've interviewed in the past few months. But I think it's safe to say that most programmers equate text processing with regular expressions.
Regexps are obviously quite useful. If you aren't extremely proficient with regular expressions right now, then you should drop everything and go become proficient with them. I bet I use regular expressions on 350 days out of every year: in my editor, on the command-line, in my code — anywhere that using one would save me time or make my code clearer. Oh, how it hurts to think about all the so-called "programmers" out there who don't know how to use regexps. Argh. Let's just drop it.
