I've been working with EMACS for as long as the lisp-ized version of
has been around and with the hoarded versions of Gosling and UniPress
before that. This conclusion is not clear to me. Yes, if you leave
your application largely unfinished such that it becomes a development
environment in itself, you need a decent extension language to write
the customized applications in. Unfortunately, most of these pidjin
lisps are barely up to the job either. A truly decent development
environment is lacking.
: Extensions are often large, complex programs in their own right, and
: the people who write them deserve the same facilities that other
: programmers rely on.
However, how many of your applications are going to end up being kitchen
sink text editors? 99% of your applications are better designed to be
targetted at what the customer wanted to begin with (of course, delivering
what a customer wantes is obviously not a goal of the GNU project, as
we are still forced to deal with the backspace key being bound to the
help key by default, which leads you into an obtuse help system that
requires more time to figure out how to use than a typical user is
willing to invest in the problem he was originally trying to solve).
We went on to fancier scripting/control/extension languages. Did most
of our application in an object oriented one, we though it was great.
The users hate it. It's too complex for the average casual researcher
needing to hack a few commands in sequence. It is a mistake to view
these people as programmers. They want simple (they think visual basic
would be an ideal extension language).
The bottom line, and this has been shown time and time again.
NOBODY CARES HOW HARD IT WAS TO DEVELOP A PACKAGE. THE MEASURE IS
HOW EASY IT IS FOR THE USER TO DO SOMETHING WITH IT.
I come to feel that the major problem RMS finds with Tcl is that it
doesn't come with the overly restrictive GNU licensing terms nor any
other FSF sanction. It seems that sometimes RMS feels it's more important
to stifle development of code other than those he blesses than to promote
the concept of software freedom he claims as his primary goal).
-Ron