We should all learn from Emacs about software longevity.
[–] d-us-vb 1 day ago
[–] paaloeye 1 day ago
Does it open the door for compromising on the core XP whilst expecting everything to be a plugin for example? It's also making the task of testing N^2 complex.
Sometimes a well-thought-through plugin system is no plugin system. Kakoune (https://github.com/mawww/kakoune) is a good example of it.
I know it's an Emacs celebration party, but that one decision made Kakoune super stable and nice to use. (I'm looking at you NeoVim).
[–] Barrin92 1 day ago
in some applications yes, in Emacs I'd say no because Emacs itself is extensible and let's people utilize its own core functions and is itself almost like a mini OS. For example the completion framework is enhanced rather than replaced by plugins like Consult.
There's a systems thinking aspect to Emacs plugin development. People make plugins always with Emacs itself in mind and to improve Emacs rather than merely the plugin. It's very anti-Unix philosophy in that way. Org-mode or Magit are good examples of this, they work well, and really only well, within Emacs.
It's what I've struggled with every time I tried out NeoVim where I ended up with ten plugins all loosely held together by tape and always something broke when something else was updated.
[–] iLemming 11 hours ago
I believe it's because of Lisp. The majority of the new generation of programmers are mostly just clueless about how Lisp remains relevant and how things in the Lisp-world are calmly and quietly getting just built, problems solved, solutions developed - without fanfare and pomposity.
The biggest digital bank in the world uses it. Nubank, using Datomic as their primary tech driver, grew from ~12M customers in 2019 to 131M in 2025 - almost 1000% growth in less than a decade. Not an exactly faithful comparison, but for JPMorgan getting to their ~80M customers took dozens of acquisitions and 150 years.
Netflix uses it. Amazon uses it. Apple uses it. Walmart built their billing system in it. Cisco's entire cybersec stack is on it. Even NASA uses it.
The number of Lisp dialects just this past decade has exploded - you can find practical, working Lisp pretty much for just about any runtime now. The amount of Emacs Lisp on GitHub alone should be at least surprising - you check the GitHub lang stats, and may think how weird - a non-general-purpose PL, that has always had one and only intent, is among some top languages, why? r/emacs subreddit gets daily, pretty much daily announcements of some new Emacs packages. The age of LLMs is now practically proving the value of Lisp. Working with an AI harness through a Lisp REPL is palpably a better experience - agents work faster, spending far fewer tokens.
It is honestly just baffling how almost every PL out there is restrictive, in the sense that they impose seemingly weird and arbitrary nuisances, while Lisp has always had just two necessities - structural editing and REPL-driven workflow. Those are the only two things anyone needs to grok in order to efficiently build with it. And even these are not hard requirements.
It gets frustratingly exhausting to dispel a constant barrage of biases. As if people just don't want to believe their own eyes to see how pragmatically commonsensical it is and always have been.
The extension language should be a full featured programming language in its own right capable of creating substantial applications because that is something people will want to do!
I wish every application worth putting a plugin system in it followed this philosophy.