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Old 28th June 2012
thirdm thirdm is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 248
Default tinyscheme in mg?

Anyone following along in the tinyscheme + mg thread on openbsd-tech? Would you use tinyscheme with mg?

My first thought was that this would be so cool if they did this. My second thought was that I bet there are some scheme (and maybe even some common lisp) people who might be more inclined to use OpenBSD if they chose to have scheme in base. I know myself, the fact they have Perl (and keep up fairly well with new versions) in base has always given me the warm and fuzzies about them.

But then I thought about it more. I wouldn't actually use it.

First, I don't use mg at all despite using and liking emacs a lot. When I want a small editor I use vi. To me, completely different key bindings and user interface is better when switching between editors than almost the same but with slight differences. mg, like every other little editor with emacs key bindings, always annoys me when I try to use it.

Then there's whether it's really exciting to have this as a way to use scheme instead of emacs lisp to customize my editor (imagining mg became my editor). Scheme is a nicer language IMO than Common Lisp, for sure, and would be an improvement over emacs lisp too. If some GNU person resurrected the guilemacs effort or they managed to somehow get guile and elisp to coexist harmoniously in a later emacs, that would be cool. But mg + tinyscheme? Are the OpenBSD people going to be the ones who finally redo emacs "the right way" with a "real lisp?" I don't think so. First, the people who've been thinking about this I've heard of are people many of the OpenBSD people probably wouldn't get along with (GNU people). Second, is tinyscheme a "real lisp"? It's some easily implementable subset of R5RS. This just sounds like emacs lisp all over again. Worse, because scheme people all seem to have their favourite implementations they want to use. For instance, I like using scsh enough that if I were using mg I'd be more likely to look at what they've done with tinyscheme and try to do the same with scsh instead, rather than using what they've done and participating in any group of OpenBSD tinyscheme users sharing scripts emacs lisp style. And then that's probably not even where they're going. It's probably more mg + tinyscheme is to emacs like nvi + Perl is to vim.

Still, scheme in base would give the warm and fuzzies.

Last edited by thirdm; 28th June 2012 at 04:21 PM. Reason: s/guilemacs/tinyscheme/ towards end.
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