<story><title>A rabbit hole full of Lisp</title><url>https://www.murilopereira.com/a-rabbit-hole-full-of-lisp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmortin</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t have anything against Lisp, I program Emacs with it, but wouldn&amp;#x27;t you get mostly the same features if Emacs used Javascript for its programming, for example?</text></item><item><author>DDSDev</author><text>Learning the concepts and ideas behind lisp really expanded my horizons as a programmer. For me, that all started with emacs. Though elisp isn&amp;#x27;t very fast and has some pain points, emacs as a whole gave me an extremely established customizable code base that I could play around and learn in.&lt;p&gt;Though it&amp;#x27;s cliché and often listed as a negative, emacs really gives the user more than just a program to edit text.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DDSDev</author><text>I think this is a good counter point, which is why I made a version of emacs fully scriptable from javascript and typescript [0]&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;emacs-ng&amp;#x2F;emacs-ng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;emacs-ng&amp;#x2F;emacs-ng&lt;/a&gt; Disclosure I&amp;#x27;ve posted about this on HN in the past, but I felt it was very relevant to the parent comment.</text></comment>
<story><title>A rabbit hole full of Lisp</title><url>https://www.murilopereira.com/a-rabbit-hole-full-of-lisp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmortin</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t have anything against Lisp, I program Emacs with it, but wouldn&amp;#x27;t you get mostly the same features if Emacs used Javascript for its programming, for example?</text></item><item><author>DDSDev</author><text>Learning the concepts and ideas behind lisp really expanded my horizons as a programmer. For me, that all started with emacs. Though elisp isn&amp;#x27;t very fast and has some pain points, emacs as a whole gave me an extremely established customizable code base that I could play around and learn in.&lt;p&gt;Though it&amp;#x27;s cliché and often listed as a negative, emacs really gives the user more than just a program to edit text.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jtsummers</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been pondering this for a while. I think you &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; have a JS-based editor that approaches or achieves what emacs offers, but I haven&amp;#x27;t encountered it. One useful thing about emacs and elisp is that lisp is one of the primary modes of interaction for users, whereas (IME) many JS-based editors seem to hide JavaScript from you to some extent.&lt;p&gt;Not in the sense that it&amp;#x27;s not there, or that there&amp;#x27;s a second language that the JS interprets. But when you open emacs without specifying a file to open you are dropped into a buffer called *scratch* which lets you directly execute elisp code. It really is a central part of the experience of using emacs. Similarly, your configuration file(s) are written in elisp, versus often a subset of JavaScript (perhaps JSON) used in JavaScript-based editors. And you&amp;#x27;re not just supplying configuration &lt;i&gt;data&lt;/i&gt;, but &lt;i&gt;extending&lt;/i&gt; the program.&lt;p&gt;And then there&amp;#x27;s completeness. While emacs has parts written in C, that portion really exists to enable elisp. Essentially every capability of the editor is directly reachable through lisp. The same doesn&amp;#x27;t seem (or at least feel) true of JavaScript-based editors I&amp;#x27;ve tried. In those, it often feels more like the creators have selected a portion of the internals to expose to users, but it&amp;#x27;s more the minimal amount needed rather than the maximal amount possible that emacs strives for.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I&amp;#x27;ve finally figured out how to insert an asterisk around a word on HN without needing spaces. Is this documented anywhere? Just use double asterisks on either end like&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  **foo**
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
*foo*&lt;p&gt;Turns out this is in the FAQ, it&amp;#x27;s been a while since I looked at the formatting part of that so I guess it changed since 10 years or so ago or I&amp;#x27;d forgotten.</text></comment>