Re: My thoughts on the Gnus source code

[Random832 <random832@fastmail.com>]

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.

> 2. Gnus doesn't use many of those programming features. I think in part
>    because it's very, very old (in computer-program years), and possibly
>    because it was written in a fairly ad-hoc fashion, and then tweaked.
>    This is definitely a problem.
> 3. I don't think the buffer issue is a real problem. You're getting
>    responses from a server as a string, and there isn't really any
>    difference between a buffer and a string: you'll need to chomp it, no
>    matter what. I understand there are such things out there as Real
>    Parsers, and that they're difficult to write, and that maybe we could
>    benefit by having one. But I don't think the buffer itself is the
>    problem.

I do get occasional "selecting deleted buffer" errors (generally a
symptom of having hit C-g at the wrong moment)

> 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?

(You know what might be nice? nth0, nth1, nth2, etc, as aliases for car,
cadr, etc. Or maybe 0th/1st/2nd...)