Hacker News Reader

Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why he didn't just say, "we won't support other languages because that's our vision for this software" and had to go into a bunch of unrelated bullshit. That's why no one listens to RMS's good ideas, because he talks about stupid, unrelated bullshit all the time. This talk was supposed to be about the future of Emacs, but the first part of it was dedicated to ranting about web JS?

View on HN

Let's get some perspective. It's a 17 minute talk, of which he spent less than 2.5 minutes on JS. People shouldn't be so irritable.

For perspective, he shoehorned an unrelated and uneducated view on a topic into the first 15% of his talk.

Put another way, people are ignoring 85% of his talk to complain about a side distraction.

A side distraction that RMS chose to put there, and a side distraction that is poorly reasoned and badly communicated.

Of course people are focused on it.

Oh I don't know. Back in school when asked to write a response to an essay, if I focused on the distraction and not the main point, things didn't go well.

I didn't say it was good to focus on it, just that obviously people are going to.

If someone wants to communicate a particular point, it's wise for them to eliminate the rabbit trails and distractions from what they say. It's especially distracting to the programmer-type if the side point is badly argued.

Human nature is, alas, fairly predictable in the large.

Presumably people often suggest the misguided notion that Emacs should run JavaScript, and he wants to explain why this would be bad.

Presumably because of emacs-ng [1], from the page " additive native layer over emacs, bringing features like Deno's Javascript and Async I/O environment, Mozilla's Webrender,".

[1] https://github.com/emacs-ng/emacs-ng

He didn't state any technical reasons, or even related ethical reasons, why JS is bad for Emacs. RMS ranted on unrelated subject matter: that JS is used for "evil" in the web browser world. Why does that taint JS as a language in any way?

You quote the word “evil”, but RMS did not use that word.

If you actually listen to (or read) what he said, he explains it quite well:

“Emacs is supposed to defend your freedom. It's supposed to help you to defend your freedom, and lead you to defend your freedom, which means it shouldn't lead you to throw your freedom away as soon as you visit a site that tries to send you a non-free program to run straight off of that other machine. So it's important not to lead users to do computing this way.”

I.e. if Emacs were to run JavaScript, people would use Emacs as a web browser, which would make Emacs help users run various privacy-invading JavaScript software.

So it's important to RMS that our software protect us from using it in the way we want if that way is going to harm us according to his personal ethics and morals? Seems sketchy to me. RMS might want to consider retiring and letting his past work define him, as he seems to be thinking and saying some dumb shit lately, IMO.

I don't know why I care what he thinks so much, I don't even use Emacs. I just bristle at his dumb moral reasoning behind what should be as simple as, "we want to focus on things other than JS support, and we also want lisp to be the primary language interface, according to our vision". His whole argument here is just moral and ethical grandstanding.

> His whole argument here is just moral and ethical grandstanding.

I don’t think it is a moral or ethical question. The more freedoms you give away to companies with significant market power, the worse off you are in an economic sense.

See Microsoft’s takeover of open-source .NET libraries and VS Code extensions, the Intel Management Engine, the glued in batteries in Apple devices, Google’s efforts to make alternative OSs harder to run on Android devices and ChromeBooks which in their factory form are built to track you, Toyota’s subscription model to keep your remote key fob functional, Mercedes’ subscription model for acceleration, and so on.

You buy hardware, you use (and often buy) software, and they are more and more locked down so you don’t truly own them and are more and more designed to force you to pay more of your money.

You said the same thing as him in slightly more vague corporate speak. I think either is fine.

Ah, so you didn't listen to the first half of the video, in which he said, that JS would be a less beautiful and less powerful language than elisp and that it would split their focus? OK! But keep the claims about what he said or did not say comming.

Right? What does the browser's execution of JavaScript have to do with how it should or should not be used in emacs?

Technically, nothing. But in practice, if Emacs ran JavaScript, people would overwhelmingly use Emacs to browse the web, which would involve the normal step of running the scads of non-free JavaScript code which is present on seemingly every web page. RMS is not aiming to simply have a technical excuse to claim that something is not his fault, he wants people to actually get into a better situation than they are now in. Therefore, it would result in a practically bad result if Emacs were to be used in this way.

I guess the technical background is, how VSCode is based on a browser running JS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com