Re: DrScheme as Emacs-like kitchen sink

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk <karczma@info.unicaen.fr>]

Bill Richter:


> 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 Shriram agrees:

> Yes.  And ditto for the rest of it.


Oh my dear!... Small? Bare minimum? But it is the most complete Scheme
system I have seen. Bigger than Chez Scheme with its exquisite goodies.
Incomparable with a dozen of other implementations, perhaps losing
in comparison with specially augmented packages for 3D modelling, etc.,
but it is big enough, with the full wxWindows layer inside, etc.

...
> 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! 

There is more to the process known as "editing" than what *typical* Emacs
scripts offer. Look at the Amaya/Thot project. We need more and more
editors of highly structured information. Not just syntax colouring of
programs, but some syntax checkers during editing. Not just simple macros,
but a full template language.

Ease of user scripting? Look at XCoral.
(OK, I admit I am promoting French products, but there are other as well.)

Also, selective presentation of information, e.g. headers only. Or section
titles only, or a particular section of text tagged as "visible". The editing
of HTML needs sometimes to find the dimensions of an included image or applet.

Not only texts are edited. Dataflow diagrams. Small, simple-minded databases,
not requiring fully-fledged DBMs. The assembly of animated images (GIF, MNG)
which don't need any image-processing software, just a structured editor.

So, please, leave Emacs live its dinosauric fate until the end, and start by
a DESIGN of a structured editor. DrScheme, why not? Plenty of utilities are 
there already, including "snips" for graphical works. And forget about kitchen
sinks. Yes, Emacs is one, and unfortunately scripting in Lisp/Scheme languages
is very susceptible to the process known as the spaghettisation (see also
scripts
in AutoLisp/AutoCAD, and in ScriptFu/Gimp), but this is avoidable, provided
a good design precedes the coding, and some functional programming paradigms
(e.g. the locality of state, lack of global variables modified by anybody, God
knows when) are followed.


Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France