Thomas Gazagnaire wrote:
> What are killer features you dream of?
Clearly, the ability to click on a function to go to the place where
it is defined is the only reason why I switched from emacs to Eclipse
... And I would be very happy to switch to a faster IDE because
Eclipse is so slow on big project.
The emacs tags system didn't work for you?
I'm surprised that's the only thing you found useful in Eclipse,
considering how primitive Emacs is.
Which brings me to my suggestion ...
Part of the reason Emacs is still so limited after nearly 30 years of
development is that it is largely based on
emacs lisp, a very poorly designed lisp dialect that makes large scale
development very difficult and
unreliable. Emacs lisp has all of the flaws that make large scale,
loosely organized, collaborative development
a disaster. It's in fact rather astonishing how little progress Emacs
has made over the years and I think it's a
great case study in how dramatic an effect poor up front design choices
can have on long term development.
Unfortunately, most of the foundational "unix-think" technologies I use
suffer from the same fatal
flaw: very poor programming language design built on top of very poor
underlying architecture. That's certainly
the case with Emacs (along with bash, TeX, X, and pretty much every
other unix technology).
What Emacs lisp does wrong is virtually a checklist of bad programming
language design. On the
other hand, these are all of the things languages like OCaml do right.
So, my dream would be for someone to build a text editor with the same
basic philosophy as Emacs,
cloning a good bit of its core functionality, but built on a sound
architecture, and capable of dealing with
the demands of modern complex software systems, like IDEs. Roughly
speaking, Emacs built on top of
a "real" language like OCaml, and with the capabilities of modern gui
systems, networks, work flows,
etc. in mind.
It would of course be a total waste of time to start writing the 5000th
text editor that goes nowhere. But
I think this would be a very worthwhile project if it is built with the
goal of overcoming the failures of
Emacs through sound technology, appropriate design, and a mind to
extensibility. The goal of building a
text editor that could serve as an IDE for OCaml would be a very good
challenge to keep these goals
tested from an early stage.
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