Hacker News Reader

Oh hey Phil. Didn't see you there.

Sure, Atom has Github paying for it, and they still don't have CIDER.

But you know what? Emacs users came up with CIDER from scratch. It barely builds on top of any existing Emacs plugins. That exact same thing could have been done in an editor like kilo if it had the right scriptable foundation.

View on HN

But why did they not build CIDER on Hemlock with Common Lisp available instead of Emacs Lisp? Because you need more than possibilites to get working without wasting time. Apart from plugins, Emacs has the core environment to build such a thing, and then there are many libraries that pile up in creating the plugins, that others wrote, so that you don't need to implement a networking library and a string processing library and a syntax definition library and subprocess management library and whatnot in order to build sth. like CIDER. Not that that's impossible, but certainly a waste of time when the tech and the community is already there. It's of course on one's self to choose whether to spend that time or not, and it's not bad or stupid to choose to create one's own editor, but it's undebatable that some time that instead could've been used productively for something else is spent duplicating others' effort, if a brand new idea is not being implemented.

Emacs users came up with Cider, but they were able to do it because there were a whole ton of them. Cider has had 154 contributors: https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/graphs/contributors

Reply on news.ycombinator.com