emacs and squeak, again...

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at disney.com
Sun Feb 25 19:40:42 UTC 2001


Hey, come on folks .....

While we are at it, let's reimplement the horse and buggy -- they 
were really popular for quite a while and had a certain degree of 
elegance. Yes, there are some good features in emacs (as in Unix), 
but why not try designing a 21st century editor (and a 21st century 
operating environment), instead of "driving into the future but 
steering only by looking in the rearview mirror" (as McLuhan so aptly 
phrased it)?

Our main task here is to get to something better than Smalltalk and 
LISP, good as they ONCE WERE......

Cheers,

Alan

At 11:03 AM -0800 2/25/01, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>  >>>>> "Lex" == Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu> writes:
>
>Lex> Can you say why you think this would be such a huge task?  E-lisp has
>Lex> the advantage of being a very simple language.  It seems the "only" big
>Lex> tasks required are:
>
>Lex>	1. Map Emacs's data structures such as "buffers" and "frames" into
>Lex> something relevant for Squeak.
>
>Lex>	2. Implement all the primitives (which requires a good solution to #1).
>
>
>Lex> I don't have a feel for how large these tasks are, but it doesn't seem
>Lex> like it should be *that* bad.  The really hard part seems to be the
>Lex> mapping in #1.  Eg, perhaps there could be one Squeak window per buffer,
>Lex> and the "mini buffer" could accept commands via pop-up windows, and the
>Lex> messages window is Transcript.  One has to come up with parallels like
>Lex> this for all of Emacs's fundamental data structures.
>
>The Emacs distribution has 275,860 lines of C (including .h files) and
>507,035 lines of Emacs Lisp.  I suspect that a lot of that C doesn't
>map trivially to Smalltalk. :)  So yes, it's probably *that* bad.
>
>--
>Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
><merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
>Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
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