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Discussion on: 100 Languages Speedrun: Episode 86: Emacs Lisp

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andreyorst profile image
Andrey Orst

Emacs ecosystem is fairly small compared with VSCode ecosystem.

That's a bold statement, that needs to be backed up at least by something. VSCode is fairly popular right now, so its package base grows rapidly, but new packages pop daily for Emacs as well. Emacs has packages for a lot of things VSCode probably would not even go for, like an NES emulator, or a tool to order salads from a specific restaurant.

Is there Github Copilot for Emacs?

Not yet, as Copilot is in closed beta, but there are already 3 other packages that implement what Copilot does, except those are FOSS.

Jupyter for Emacs?

Yes, yes. Actually, Org Mode can do everything Jupiter can, and with much more languages than Jupiter.

Syntax highlighting for 90% of the languages I covered for Emacs?

Oh boy. Because I have nothing more important to do this sunday morning, I've went and checked almost all languages you've written about:

  • ✅ Python
  • ✅ Emojicode
  • ✅ CSS
  • ✅ Lua
  • ✅ Kotlin
  • ✅ Tcl/Tk
  • ✅ Sed and Regular Expression FizzBuzz
  • ✅ Ada
  • ✅ Befunge
  • ✅ Tcsh
  • ✅ D
  • ✅ Arc
  • ✅ Awk
  • ✅ Octave
  • ✅ Rake
  • ✅ PLY Python Lex-Yacc
  • ✅ Julia
  • ✅ Forth
  • ✅ Clojure
  • ✅ XSLT
  • ✅ Ruby
  • ✅ Postscript
  • ✅ JQ
  • ✅ Raku (Perl 6)
  • ❌ Whenever
  • ✅ TeX
  • ✅ Verilog
  • ✅ SageMath
  • ✅ Fortran
  • ✅ Gherkin
  • ✅ Logo
  • ✅ Racket Scheme
  • ✅ Groovy
  • ✅ AppleScript
  • ✅ OCaml
  • ✅ BC
  • ✅ SQLite
  • ✅ Assembly
  • ✅ Prolog
  • ❌ Thue
  • ✅ M4
  • ✅ Elvish
  • ✅ Crystal
  • ✅ COBOL
  • ✅ R
  • ✅ Perl
  • ✅ QBasic
  • ✅ Haskell
  • ✅ PHP
  • ✅ Scala
  • ✅ XQuery
  • ✅ Smalltalk
  • ❌ Asciidots
  • ✅ POV-Ray
  • ✅ LLVM Intermediate Representation
  • ✅ CSVQ
  • ✅ ChucK
  • ✅ Xonsh
  • ❌ Io
  • ❌ Ioke
  • ✅ Wren
  • ❌ Factor
  • ❌ Windows Batch Files
  • ✅ Free Pascal
  • ❌ Jasmin
  • ❌ Designing New Esoteric Language Tuples
  • ✅ Elixir
  • ❌ Pyret
  • ✅ PowerShell
  • ❌ Lingua Romana Perligata
  • ❌ Linguagem Potigol
  • ✅ Emacs Lisp
  • ❌ Sidef

So the stats are - 73 languages total, 60 covered, 13 uncovered, which is 82%.
Not quite 90%, but I bet still much higher than you've expected.
I didn't search too deep, mostly included everything that shows in top google results or directly in the package manager.

If you're already an Emacs user, with tons of customizations you've created for yourself, you might just as well keep using it, but I'd definitely not recommend it for anyone new.

Yes. Emacs is a journey you need to come to by yourself. Simply because Emacs is a tool that you can truly make your own thing.

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taw profile image
Tomasz Wegrzanowski

Yeah, it's higher than I expected, but VSCode does all those plus 6 more (Io, Factor, Pyret, Linguagem Potigol, Asciidots, Windows Batch Files), getting it to 90%.

There's no sweetgreen, but there's NES emulators.

By simple count there are 33829 extensions in VSCode extension manager, 5241 on Sublime Text package manager, 5097 on Emacs MELPA.

This gap is only going to get widen, as there's a lot more people who can write JavaScript than Emacs Lisp. It's also quite easy to port stuff from the web to VSCode.

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andreyorst profile image
Andrey Orst

By simple count there are 33829 extensions in VSCode extension manager, 5241 on Sublime Text package manager, 5097 on Emacs MELPA.

I believe in quality, not quantity.

For instance, VSCode had three plugins for working with files over ftp protocol, and none of those worked as advertised, constantly getting de-synchronized and not being able to pull files. Emacs has one package that does it, and many more things for working with various remote file editing protocols, but the most important thing is that it works.

Emacs is already 36 years old, let's see how VSCode will do in 36 years :)