Re: [Caml-list] What does Jane Street use/want for an IDE? What about you?

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 09:45:34AM -0600, Robert Morelli wrote:
> What Emacs lisp does wrong is virtually a checklist of bad programming 
> language design. On the
> other hand, these are all of the things languages like OCaml do right.

It'd be interesting to hear[1] what exact features of elisp are
counterproductive for large-scale collaborative programming.

I've not looked very closely at elisp, but assumed the reason that
emacs remains "unconfigurable" for most users is because it's Lisp,
not because of the particular dialect of Lisp.  Most programmers look
at Lisp and run a mile, and I don't think an OCaml editor will fare
much better if that is the case.

FWIW microemacs[2] used a C-like language for configuration and
extension, and this language was almost laughably incapable of doing
the most basic things.  You'd think that a language designed for an
editor would, you know, be able to handle at least strings properly,
but the microemacs programming language couldn't even do that.
Nevertheless at the electronics laboratory where I started out,
electrical engineers (totally unused/untrained as programmers) wrote
huge macros and extensions in this horrible language.

Rich.

[1] Here or in a blog posting ...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microemacs

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat