Re: Emacs design and architecture

[Richard Stallman]

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  > None of the web browsers I've seen for emacs support javascript execution,

That is a relief.

  > and it would be a difficult thing to add. At a guess, the easiest method
  > would involve emacs running (or communicating with) an existing browser and
  > interrogating the results, very roughly along the same lines as CIDER or
  > SLIME bring clojure or common lisp execution into emacs.

I first saw CIDER mentioned in a recent discussion, and no one who
mentioned it explained what it does.  I don't know what SLIME does
either.  Would you please tell me briefly what they do, in 20 lines
for each?  I don't want details, at least not to start.

  > Note that it's _much_ easier to bring simple javascript execution into
  > emacs -- there are cli/repl-style javascript interpreters available for
  > such tasks.

I think that this development would make EMacs less coherent and more
work to maintain and document.  It is better not to do this.

  > In short: the path the "modern web" took to get to interactive "rich"
  > documents on the web ended up very strongly tied to a particular underlying
  > representation of the content, including how it is loaded, displayed,
  > styled, and updated. Those pieces are far more theoretically distinct than
  > actually composable.

That might seem unfortunate in a technical sense, but it turns out
beneficial because it saves us from temptation.  Since the "modern
web" works by trampling users' fredeom by sending programs they do not
control to run on their machines, GNU Emacs should not get on board
with that.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)