Re: About Emacs Modernisation Project

[Maarten Bergvelt]

On 2010-06-01, LanX <lanx.perl@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> > I think Emacs Lisp actually
>> > encourages the production of a lot of little, useful hacks.
>>
>> Indeed.  But lexical scoping and name spaces wouldn't make any
>> difference in this respect.
>
> But the lack of namespaces leads to very long names which IMHO
> irritate newbies.
>
> At least it did irritate me at the time to find out that I need to
> type "M-x font-lock-fontify-buffer" to get highlighting, and it still
> irritates others when I explain  to do so.
>
> Snippets manipulating different aspects of font-lock would look less
> intimidating, without the need to repeat "font-lock-" 20 times.

Have you discovered the tab-key? I am an incompetent 2 finger typer,
but with emacs I am pretty fast, as I can use all kinds of automatic
completions. 

Having long identifiers makes them easier to understand, and only
slightly harder to input.

> And something like customize-group NAME-SPACE wouldn't need to list
> the prefix NAME-SPACE-... for each option.
>
> IMHO the option to use shorter identifiers for functions and variables
> would increase the acceptance of elisp and emacs!
>
> You might think that it's only a matter of getting used to, but maybe
> you should better ask the folks who turned away maybe thinking that a
> system with >20 char identifiers is far too complicated...
>
> When manipulating the DOM of a browser with JS I have standard
> mechanisms to considerately shorten the path to a variable or
> function.
>
> Are there any in eLisp?


-- 
Maarten Bergvelt