I'm learning Emacs Lisp and I came across this decade old post saying that at some point Guile (Scheme) will replace Emacs Lisp, or Emacs will be rewritten with Guile.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081201143448/http://sanpietro.red-bean.com/guile/guile/old/3114.html
I was wondering if this is still a possibility, and if developers should be trying to write Elisp with this in mind? The original goal was for Guile to be backwards compatible with Elisp, but it seems like developing Scheme is the better choice.
It should be possible after Guile 2.0 is released to use Guile with Emacs. The current pre-release supports ecmascript as well as scheme and there is apparently an elisp branch also but I haven't looked into it. Once Guile fully supports elisp it shouldn't be too hard to replace the current elisp interpreter with Guile. The real question is whether or not people are going to rewrite their customizations and add-ons in scheme or just continue to use elisp. Regardless, Guile 2.0 should make the possibility of a Guile Emacs much closer to reality than any other development in the past 10 years.
Guile 2.0.0 (released 2011-02-06) supports Emacs Lisp.
You can switch at the repl like so:
scheme#(guile-user)> ,language elisp
Happy hacking with Emacs Lisp! To switch back, type `,L scheme'.
elisp#(guile-user)> (eq 1 2)
$1 = #nil
As to if/when someone is going to do some surgery on Emacs to extract elisp and drop in Guile-in-elisp-mode: the Guile 2.0.2 reference manual suggests this is the plan but it's not ready yet:
We hope that eventually Guile's
implementation of Elisp will be good
enough to replace Emacs' own
implementation of Elisp.
guile and emacs, again - updated Emacs src, using non-hacked Guile, 23 Aug 2009
PS: I was noticing recently that my first
commit to the Emacs source tree
relating to this project was on
1999-08-28, just shy of ten years ago.
I'm not sure if I should celebrate or
be depressed on Friday.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2009-08/msg00163.html
There have been some interesting discussions on this topic in recent times:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00665.html
http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/04/02/recent-developments-in-guile
I wouldn't worry too much about it. There are a couple of projects to use Guile with Emacs, but I sense that they're not mainline supported. As one of the developers of one of the projects observed, no one will switch unless all their existing elisp runs flawlessly in the new engine, which is a pretty tall task.
Not that it will never happen, it's just been 'in the clouds' for a few years.
Using a VM like parrot seems more interesting for the future than Guile as Parrot VM can handle many different dynamic languages and each language can reuse what has been developed in another language.
The work left to be done is :
adding emacs low-level concepts and functions to Parrot VM (basic elisp types like the buffer type, window, frame...)
creating an elisp language port to Parrot VM.
With such functionalities you could have all legacy elisp code running on Parrot VM without any porting issues, and new code could be developed and reused by any language supported by Parrot VM.
Related
I've read many topics regarding this issue, but couldn't get it to an end. I want to be able to code in LISP on Mac, using Emacs and XLispStat.
So far, I've installed Emacs with HomeBrew but I got stuck when installing XLispStat. Can someone detail the steps for doing this? I'll appreciate!
P.S.: This is the required installation for Lisp. If there is something easier to achieve on Mac, I'll try that as well!
I posted a similar answer on this question. Short version: your options for an OS X Lisp environment are LispBox, LispWorks personal (crippleware warning) or Emacs+SLIME via quicklisp/ELPA.
Since your comments imply that you're casting a pretty wide net for workable Common Lisp tools, I'll also mention that CLISP seems to be supported via various OS X ports/package managers and has a fairly comfortable REPL (you can, of course get the same in SBCL with Linedit).
EDIT: As Rainer and Vsevolod mention below, Clozure and MCLIDE also exist. I've used neither myself, so I can't give you any details (though Clozure has been recommended to me on multiple occasions).
Oh, and is there a possibility to write the code is some normal text editor and compile it somehow in the terminal?
Not in the way that I think you mean, but yes, you can write a .lisp file with Sublime or whatever, then sbcl your-file-here.lisp. Note that sbcl your-file-here.lisp starts a running Lisp instance with a REPL, and incurs all the overhead that implies. If you're dead set against Emacs, what you could do is run a REPL separately from your project directory, then just (load "file-you-changed.lisp") or (ql:quickload :your-project-name) every so often.
xlispstat can be compiled on Mac OS 10.8 and works perfectly fine. It needs a couple of little edits for the nitpicking compiler but works perfectly with XQuartz. The people who are telling you to use other systems don't know how well integrated xlispstat is for people doing numerical work.
I am tring to setup an environment for editing clojure in emacs. I'm relatively new to emacs
(only 1 yr) and totally new to clojure (2 weeks). I've found lots of tutorial online about how to setup most of which talk about lein, swank-clojure, slime and nrepl.
It seems that swank-clojure and slime need to work together but swank-clojure is deprecated, so what left is nrepl and some built in lisp repl mode.
I tried inferior lisp mode first because it is the default for clojure-mode and it looks fine to me. But I can't seem tp find a way to switch namespace easily within it.
I then tried emacs-live which is like a kit for emacs newbie that comes with nrepl.
I can then do "nrepl-jack-in" to get a repl even though it is very slow..
It can switch namespace easily with "C-C M-n". Howevre, sometime after switching, a buffer called nrepl error would pop up and won't let me close. I have to force close emacs instead. Also, nrepl does not have much of syntax highlight.
To sum up:
after swank-clojure been deprecated, which repl should I use? slime-repl? nrepl? or others?
I don't know much about clojure now so I'm not sure bwhat feature is important to a repl but it would be nice to at least have syntax highlight and can easily switch between namespace like "C-C M-n" in nrepl, and maybe a debugger.
I heartily recommend nREPL.el for various reasons:
swank-clojure is dead officially, but has been dead for a long while. While it was getting some job done, nothing much has changed or improved in it after its initial inception. The development of swank-clojure required significant expertise in Common Lisp, which Clojure developers generally lack and are unwilling to attain.
clojure-mode 2.0.0 doesn't support swank-clojure + SLIME at all. This move was hugely beneficial to both clojure-mode (which dropped a lot of legacy code) and nrepl.el (which's development pace was increased after the announcement).
nrepl.el is picking up features really FAST. I'm one of its contributors so I should know :-) Recently a lot of cool things like macroexpansion, compilation error highlighting and multiple connections support were added, just to name a few. Many more features and refinements are in the pipeline. nrepl.el's architecture is much simpler than SLIME's and it's much easier for regular Clojure hackers to extend nrepl.el.
SLIME syntax highlighting? The REPL has the same font-locking in both SLIME and nrepl.el and the source buffers are using clojure-mode's font locking. It other words - syntax highlighting's the same in both.
Emacs Live relies on vendorized git submodules and generally the versions of the extensions it ships are lagging behind the upstream a bit. You might want to try as an alternative Emacs Prelude, which also ships with Clojure support, but always uses the latest packages available in MELPA.
There is no slime-repl (outside SLIME that is). At this point it's just swank-clojure + SLIME or nrepl.el. Given that nrepl.el even now implements most of what SLIME has - you'd better get used to using nrepl.el.
Update
nREPL.el was renamed to CIDER after version 0.2.0.
nREPL is probably your best bet. It's the officially suggested replacement for swank-clojure, and it's really easy to set up. (As for SLIME, swank-clojure is SLIME support for Clojure. SWANK is the backend communications channel for SLIME. If you want to use SLIME, you'll want swank-clojure — but of course that's been abandoned in favor of nREPL.)
My experience at the moment is that nrepl.el is somewhat less usuable than SWANK was; it is however picking up fast, both in terms of features and in terms of stability.
Installing Swank is now a bit harder because Clojure-mode has dropped it, so you'd need an older version. So, my advice would be, if you already have a working swank setup, then don't change anything for a couple of months; on the other hand, if you don't have a working setup, go for nrepl because it's going to happen so or later, and Swank is going to involve old versions.
If you end up with nrepl, as I say, it's not perfect yet, but keep the knowledge that, to coin a phrase, things can only get better.
Emacs is the IDE of choice for programming Erlang.
There are plenty of good modes (distel, erlware-mode, the default erlang mode,...), but what are your recommendations for setting up Emacs for professional Erlang development?
Set up erlang-mode as described in the README, and then activate Flymake:
(require 'erlang-flymake)
That gives you highlighting of warnings and errors as you type.
I'd recommend using erlang-mode from the latest Erlang/OTP release (R14A as I type this), regardless of what release you normally use, as it evolves quite rapidly and is now just as good as erlware-mode, IMHO.
If you're using Emacs 24 or later, I recommend installing erlang-mode from MELPA. The 'erlang' package tracks the 'maint' branch of the Erlang/OTP Git repository, so it is always reasonably up-to-date.
If you want more than erlang-mode offers, a possible alternative to Distel is EDTS, the Erlang Development Tool Suite. To quote the readme file:
EDTS is meant to be a able to replace Distel but only provides part of the most
commonly used of Distel's features, specifically the equivalents of
erl-find-module, erl-find-source-under-point, erl-who-calls and
erl-refactor-subfunction. As far as I know, those are the only Distel features
that 98% of people use, but if there is anything from Distel that you are
missing in EDTS, please let me know.
If you are using EDTS, please remove Distel from your configuration, since
running both can create some confusion.
Look onto this article about different packages for work with Erlang from Emacs. I personally use erlware-mode + distel
erlang.el (for indentation and font-locking) and Distel (debugger, M-. etc.) are essential. ESense, I've never used, and I've no idea what the erlware mode does. You may want to use some of the standard Emacs utilities (flymake, interface to version control, and so forth) when writing Erlang.
I've found erlang-mode ok but it doesn't support kerl (which is a useful thing, kinda like rvm for erlang, except it works).
So I started this:
https://github.com/nicferrier/emacs-erlang-extras
which supports multiple erlangs.
I'm intending that it will support rebar as well:
https://github.com/rebar/rebar/wiki/Getting-started
I found out ESense on emacswiki. Might worth a try.
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Should I learn to use Emacs with no intention to learn Lisp, if my other option is to get familiar with vi?
Yes. With all the resources out there (FAQ, Emacs wiki, and the Stack Exchange Emacs site) and custom (M-x custom). You don't need to know Lisp. You just cut/paste what you find.
You can drive a Ferrari/Yugo without knowing the internals of the combustion engine or how a Formula One transmission works...
Why not?
You can still learn vi (probably Vim or Elvis).
You can learn jEdit. Or nano and Pico. Or whatever other editor, environment, and language-host you fancy.
Why put such an arbitrary restriction on things? While your Emacs experience will be better if you learn at least basic Emacs Lisp (a .. derelict .. Lisp implementation), it's not required. But at the end of the day, it's a tool. Get as many useful tools as you can. "Useful" also really depends on context.
I have used Emacs for several years with next to no knowledge of Lisp and it served me well for all of the projects I used it for.
You can always simply assume that the configuration you're writing is not in Emacs Lisp and that it is just some funny configuration format - there a lot stranger examples out there (such as Sendmail).
I should warn you though that once I started learning Emacs Lisp my Emacs mastery expanded extremely rapidly - now that I understand the details of the language I can easily bend any configuration to my needs and more importantly I started writing my own extension to Emacs, which add to it even more capabilities.
If you decided to start with Emacs, I recommend to read first this great book - it taught me a lot of things for Emacs at the beginning and it assumes no Lisp knowledge. It won't teach you any Lisp either. Afterwards my advice would be read the official Emacs manual and start exploring the Emacs Wiki and #emacs on Freenode.
Learning Emacs truly is a journey that is not for the faint of heart, but it is journey that is most certainly worth it...
Configuring Emacs is a journey, and it's something that you're going to want to do. Being able to customize your developing environment is one of Emacs' greatest strengths. It's almost unavoidable. You pick up bits and pieces just by looking at other people's .emacs files.
Knowing just a little bit of Lisp goes a long way in Emacs.
You don't need to learn Lisp to use Emacs. Even basic customization of Emacs works fine without Lisp knowledge. If you need something beyond your capabilities, there are many helpful Emacs users.
Learning a bit Emacs Lisp will later enhance your understanding of Emacs.
Emacs Lisp is a relatively simple Lisp dialect. Basic Emacs Lisp is not that difficult to learn. As an experienced Lisp user I have to say that Emacs is available quite some time and the users have written some amazing things in Emacs (like Org-mode). Some of the Emacs extensions are very very well written and it is a pleasure to read the code.
Well, if you don't want to customize your Emacs, you won't need Lisp, either. And you can also do some basic modifications using the build-in customize functionality and by copy&pasting code of others. But truth being: I have written several hundreds of lines of code to customize Emacs to suit my needs. On the other side, as far as I know, vi is not as customizable as Emacs, so in the end it is probably more about what editor you like more and you should try both.
I know little Lisp and use Emacs to edit my C and OCaml programs on Windows and Linux.
I've been using Emacs for a year and a half, and really only picked up whatever Emacs Lisp came without trying. I have a heavily extended set of configurations (first in a .emacs file, and now in ~/.emacs.d/init.el and friends), which are totally a result of cutting and pasting from the excellent resources found online.
Aside from, of course, the EmacsWiki, you should see the fine Emacs Starters Kit and subscribe to Planet Emacsen --- preferably in a feed reader. It's prettier.
Having said that, after you have a working setup you might yield to the temptation to learn a little Emacs Lisp. I've just started the free Introduction to Programming In Emacs Lisp, which comes with Emacs and is best read from within Emacs Info. It assumes neither programming ability nor Lisp knowledge, and is a friendly introduction to the 'vibe' of Emacs Lisp which I find to be well-written in the extreme, friendly and concise, and worth 10x every minute I have spent with it.
I'd like to take an existing application (written in OCaml) and create an Emacs "interface" for it (like, for example, the Emacs GDB mode). I would prefer to do this without writing a ton of Lisp code. In MVC terms, I'd like for the View to be Emacs, but for the Model and Controller to remain (primarily) OCaml.
Does anybody know of a way to write Emacs extensions in a language other than Lisp? This could either take the form of bindings to the Emacs extension API in some other language (e.g., making OCaml a first-class Emacs extension language) or an Emacs interaction mode where, for example, the extension has a pipe into which it can write Emacs Lisp expressions and read out result values.
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs-en?CategoryExtensionLanguage is a list of all non-Elisp extension languages you can use.
It does appear to be dynamic language centric.
http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/ is missing from that list, as it is not quite an extension language, but an Elisp-Common Lisp bridge. Its source code would show how to communicate back and forth over sockets.
A similar IDE for Erlang is Distel, at http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/distel/ (currently down) and https://github.com/massemanet/distel.
Good luck!
I don't know if this will work for your particular problem, but I have been doing something similar using the shell-command-to-string function:
(shell-command-to-string
"bash -c \"script-to-exec args\"")
So for example, we have existing scripts written in python which will mangle a file, so the above lets me invoke the script via emacs lisp.
A quick google search found this page describing a system to write extensions in Python, so it seems feasible to do what you want... you will just have to see if anyone has written a similar framework for OCaml.
Some Extension Api is now possible with the incoming emacs 25.1 and dynamic modules
A Library, emacs-ffi offer a foreign function interface based on libffi.
Check out complete documentation on the README.
Try PyMacs, which allows extending Emacs in Python.
edit: updated link.
From the statically typed languages side, there is something that looks quite performant and well featured for Haskell:
https://github.com/knupfer/haskell-emacs
there is also probably something useful for Scala to be reused from the Ensime project (has a bridge for both Emacs and Vim):
https://github.com/ensime/ensime-server
Furthermore, a quick google search revealed another potential candidate for extending Emacs with a classic FP language, OCaml; the project has a lot of .ml source files so there's got to be an Emacs-OCaml bridge somewhere:
https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin
There is no "Extension API". Emacs Lisp is way in there, and it ain't moving.
You can run Emacs commands from your other process. Have a look at Gnuserv.
There are plenty of applications where Emacs is the View for a Model/Controller in a separate process. The Emacs GDB interface is a good example. I'm not sure of a simpler example, maybe sql-postgresql?