There's so much tooling that currently depends on clojure-mode (and will eventually depend on clojure-ts-mode several years down the line) that creating some new mode just for the sake of doing it makes 0 sense. If someone wants to do it - be my guest. But conversations like this one are what's alienating people from Emacs's core.
On 27/08/2023 04:35, Richard Stallman wrote:
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>
> > > What those people think should not be a crucial issue, because writing
> > > a major mode to handle a language is not a big job. We have dozens of
> > > them in Emacs. Lots of us here would be able to replace it.
>
> > I would really not recommend increasing user confusion around which is
> > the recommended major mode, and which one is not.
>
> That argument is too vague to support any particular conclusion.
>
> If we install a command called clojure-mode in the core Emacs, that
> will in a sense be the preferred one. If you type M-x clojure-mode in
> Emacs, that is the one you'll get.
>
> We could avoid confusion with the NonGNU ELPA package by renaming
> that one. Asking to load it using its new name would make it clear
> that that's the package you want.
NonGNU ELPA now has the package called clojure-ts-mode, it doesn't
conflict. But it's specifically for use with tree-sitter grammar.
> > That affects many third-party packages, as well as configuration
> > snippets floating around the web.
>
> Sorry, I don't follow you. Would you please spell out what you mean?
clojure-mode is an existing package with thousands (tens of thousands?
millions?) users and certain existing functionality. Other (also
third-party) packages rely on it for various functionality. It's not a
bare-bones major mode with basic functionality only.
If we simply overtook the name but didn't reimplement it 1-to-1, that
would break a lot of user configurations, many existing recipes "how to
develop in Clojure with Emacs" posted around the web, not to mention
that would be an insult toward the developers of the existing package.
There wouldn't be too much point in that either, because very few only
use the major mode for development without additional niceties like CIDER.