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Comment by pluies | Hacker News Reader

Soo... What I get is: John McCarthy is the inventor of Lisp, the language we all tell ourselves we'll learn one day. Lisp is used in Emacs macro.

However, I honestly don't get what's going on here. Is that a subtle troll against Perl? Just a reminder that in Lisp, data and program are interchangeable?

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It's a monster discussion, and threading seems to be broken at that part, so it's hard to say.

But the main part of the discussion concerns a suggestion to replace Emacs Lisp with Perl. McCarthy's concern seems to be whether Emacs uses the ability of Lisp to treat code as data, and whether Perl has that facility.

A couple of answers gave examples of Emacs using that ability.

I could be wrong, and I love Perl, but I don't see how it could replace elisp. I think it would be cool though. I often thought that Vim should dump vimscript for a preferred language extension of either Perl or Python.

  $ find emacs-23.2/ -name \*.c | xargs cat | wc -l
   339497
  $ find emacs-23.2/ -name \*.el | xargs cat | wc -l
  1391690

Seeing that about 80% of Emacs code is Lisp, not to mention the countless extensions that don't ship with Emacs, and much of the C code is geared towards being called from Lisp, suggesting to replace Emacs Lisp by Perl is essentially suggesting to rewrite Emacs from scratch.

The message was written in 1998. I don't think anyone is considering doing that now.

Thanks for the explanation. :)

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