Dekks Hertondekkzz78@ruby.social
Jun 2, 2022, 3:35 PMReplies
splatt9990splatt9990@fosstodon.orgJun 3, 2022, 2:52 PM@dekkzz78 emacs is very very old (1987). When it was created, there wasn't a free lisp implementation they could use. Using an existing lisp implementation would mean tying emacs to a proprietary license. On top of that, creating their own implementation of lisp allowed them to tailor it to the job of extending a text editor whereas an existing lisp would have been more general in focus.
- Dekks Hertondekkzz78@ruby.socialJun 5, 2022, 8:18 AM
@splatt9990 very interesting, seems to have been a realistic design choice barring multithreading but that's partially hindsight
- splatt9990splatt9990@fosstodon.orgJun 5, 2022, 1:16 PM
@dekkzz78 multi-threading is a modern concern. Until the early 2000's most people only had a single processor with no threading support. By the time it became a concern, elisp (and by extension, emacs) was too well established to add it easily (multi-threading isn't something you can just add later. It would require you to redesign the whole architecture.)
- Dekks Hertondekkzz78@ruby.socialJun 5, 2022, 9:30 PM
@splatt9990 exactly my point re hindsight
- splatt9990splatt9990@fosstodon.orgJun 5, 2022, 11:01 PM
@dekkzz78 hindsight would imply that there was a mistake they could have corrected if they'd noticed it and prioritized it. Considering multi processing (to say nothing of actual threading) support was more than a decade in the future when they designed elisp I think that's probably unfair. It'd be like designing your language today with quantum computing in mind despite the fact that no one will be able to use it for decades.
- Dekks Hertondekkzz78@ruby.socialJun 6, 2022, 12:58 PM
@splatt9990 first HW for multi CPU was mid to late 90s for PC, but multi threading has its genesis in academic papers 50s. Pentium 4/ DEC Alpha multi threading [ SMT] was looked at by IBM in 1968 on the back of U of Washington work. So it wasn't exactly unknown in early 80s.