Re: My thoughts on the Gnus source code

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>> 1. I don't think there's anything inherently unsuitable about Elisp for
>>    writing a MUA (or any other type of software). It's a general
>>    programming language, a little different from Python or other more
>>    popular languages, but it comes with a full complement of modern
>>    programming features.
>
> The real problem isn't Lisp as a language, it's the lack of
> multithreading or asynchronous constructs (I don't know if Emacs has the
> latter, but if it does, Gnus doesn't seem to use it - it certainly
> doesn't have the former.)
>
> As a *user*, the biggest usability problem I've had with Gnus is the
> inability to easily recover from dropped connections. The fact that it
> tries to hold the connections open long-term in the first place is
> another possible cause of this, and someone gave me a setting to try to
> make it do this less, but I didn't see any improvement.

That's definitely true! I'm in China, and the Great Firewall froths at
the mouth about long-running TLS connections. Recovering from bum
connections would be a great area for improvement, but unfortunately one
I'm not capable of coding or even really commenting about. I don't know
much about network programming.

[...]

>> On a side note, I'd also hope we can start treating code like the below
>> as a bug. It may do what it's supposed to do, but...
>
> I think that A: any such code should be heavily commented, and B: it
> should use let variables. I'm not very experienced with Elisp - is there
> an "unpack/let" construct? Is that what pcase is supposed to be for?

Yes, I think it would just be a matter of helper macros, lets, etc. This
isn't quite what pcase is for -- that'as more for matching input (sort
of a cond on steroids), whereas what we need are functions for
manipulating complicated/nested list structures.

E