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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly "Writing Emacs Extensions" book years ago. I just never got into the mode of using Elisp on a daily basis and it's faded from memory.

I'm excited about this book. And, I really wish there was a book that showed how a developer using a more modern language like JavaScript could use it to customize Emacs.

This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powerful way. When I install a new Emacs into a new debian machine, i still struggle to get package installation working. But I'm getting really worried about the direction Microsoft is taking with VSCode and wish I could be as productive in Emacs. Opening up that environment to modern developers who could tweak their own tools would be amazing and revolutionary.

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> This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powerful way.

This notion that Javascript is superior to (e.g. elisp) because JS is new and elisp is "old" is really irritating. The reasons JS exists has absolutely zero to do with any issues with elisp or lisp or C or haskell or any other programming language. The fact that you know it and do not know elisp is a real thing, but it says nothing about the qualities and properties of either language.

its such an absurd idea. look at the top contributors for VSCode, and how many of them are employed at Microsoft:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/graphs/contributors

How can you possible separate vscode "winning because of javascript" and "it has development budget X times the budget of Emacs"

No one said it was superior, but more people know it.

The claim was the VSCode is "winning" because it "embraces modern languages". To me that implies at least some kind of superiority.

No, it doesn’t, it implies that it uses a language which is widespread and most everyone knows. Languages themselves being superior tends to be an opinion.

> "Most everyone knows".

Pardon my age or something. but if you're a software developer who doesn't work on web-dev, you probably do not know JS, certainly not enough to code much in it.

Maybe "most everyone" leaves enough room to describe all the people who do embedded and native development - I don't know the actual numbers.

But the sentence didn't say: "VSCode is winning because its extension language widespread and most everyone knows it". It said "modern languages". Haskell is a modern language. Rust is a modern language. Lua is a modern language. If VSCode (somehow) used them as its extension language, would it still be winning? Clearly, no.

I should have said "modern and more popular languages." For the record, I like elisp/lisp, I just don't use them at my day job and have a hard time customizing emacs with them. Emacs is still my favorite editor, but for my day job, I can get much more done in VSCode because it "embraces" (whatever that means) JS much better than Emacs. I wish it wasn't so, and I'm worried about it long term.

Try neovim to see what this approach might look like, yes it's vi not emacs, but they allow python and rust plugins and have a plugin framework now. It's killed sublime for me. And I used to use emacs over vi.

Personally I'd like emacs a lot more if it's plugins system just worked like vscodes does and as you said let me use languages I'm familiar with.

Unfortunately it looks like it's a dead project, but https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-epc builds out an RPC framework for emacs. This would theoretically allow you to use any language you want. The repo shows node.js, python, and ruby integration.

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