Hacker News Reader

Comment by anthk | Hacker News Reader

We need, OTOH, the other side of the coin:

The EMACS hater handbook. Under a GFDL license, of course.

No multithreading, I/O locks under GNUs/eww, glacial slow email header parsing under GNUs, huge badass file for RMAIL if you don't like GNUs (instead of parsing MailDir) and so on.

View on HN

>No multithreading, I/O locks under GNUs/eww, glacial slow

All this would not happen if RMS had chosen Common Lisp to implement it...

RMS hates Common Lisp because it's a bit bloated (tons) and the closes to GNU Emacs written in CL it's Lem and it feels far slower than Emacs.

Ironically, the GNU system now needs hundreds of megabytes of installation just to compile C.

The bloat is not about the size (sbcl and ecl can be pretty slim for what they do), it's the spec.

To write down the full spec, you have to document everything in those hundreds of megabytes. That's going to run for thousands of pages.

If your spec is small but you have hundreds of megabytes of bloat, it means you're not even remotely documenting everything.

You are really wrong. The Common Lisp Hyperspecs weights very little in my machine. 2.2 MB compressed as a TGZ.

It's really docummented. But the standard compared to Scheme it's huge.

PD: 2.2MB as HTML text weights nothing. You don't need images. It's 16MB uncompressed. More than 1500 items. People often forgets how little plain text weights.

Bloated? Sure. But slower than emacs? Strong disagreement here.

I find Lem a lot snappier than emacs.

Not on my n270 Atom, even under SBCL.

Huh I wonder if it’s an Atom thing

I have no real experience with mbox and pop3 (maildir is what I’ve always used). But I still think you would need to partition mbox files because that’s what you would do with physical mail (which is the basis of the protocol and everything around it). I kinda like rmail.

True, we don't need a vi(m) haters handbook. That's just natural.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com