Re: DrScheme as Emacs-like kitchen sink

[Bill Richter <richter@math.nwu.edu>]

   the original goal of producing DrScheme is to provide a gui-based
   interactive PDE for Scheme that assists beginners in learning CS
   concepts.
   
   We believe that we have gotten very close to this goal.

Thanks, Matthias.  I think I understand now what you wrote yesterday:

   Emacs is a kitchen sink with a power knife. It cut even the best
   students at Rice. We needed something better.

I think you're saying that Emacs has too many features!  I naively
thought the problem with Emacs was that it was poorly coded, or wasn't
customized right for PLT, or didn't have the features you wanted.  But
this sounds like a different idea: students can cause themselves all
kinds of trouble in Emacs.  Especially high school students.  And it
seems crazy to ask beginning Scheme students, high school students, to
learn Emacs before they learn Scheme.  That's wrong, so

I think you wrote DrScheme to deliberately be small & with a bare
minimum of features: easy to learn, and hard to cut yourself with.

Am I right now?  That makes sense, a laudable goal.

And it seems to jibe with the fact that .mred.prefs seems a lot
different from a .emacs file.  DrScheme isn't too easy to customize,
you gotta be an expert.  Emacs on the other hand is easy to customize,
and won't work until you learn how to customize it!

   Here are two non-goals:
    * an environment with multi-programmer support an all-purpose
    * editing tool

If I'm right above, then I fully understand.  What do you all use as
an editor then, you must be using Emacs too!

   Having said that, you could use Robby's framework to develop an
   Emacs-like tool in Scheme. No questions asked. We can support you
   in general ways. Others on the list may join in. We don't have the
   manpower to give you more support than that.

That would be great.  If I need more support than that, then I'm
barking up the wrong tree anyway.

   Finally, you may wish to look into a project by Mike Sperber @
   Tuebingen. He's interested in porting the XEmacs code base from
   Emacs Lisp to Scheme. At the most recent ICFP, he also presented a
   paper on this general topic. It's neat stuff that a mathematician
   like you might just appreciate.

I'd like a good math project, but the aim doesn't sit well with me.
Scheme is quite different from Emacs Lisp and XEmacs Lisp, so it would
be a daunting task to translate one to the other.  But why bother!
DrScheme seems a great opportunity to start over, break free from all
the over-engineered Emacs Lisp code.  How I've wanted to junk fill.el
and write a new one!  Much of Emacs Lisp code is hilarious, it's just
all kinds of bells & whistles attached on at odd places to fix one bug
or another, coherence gets lost that way.