From: mail@axel-reichert.de   
      
   gazelle@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) writes:   
      
   > In article ,   
   > Lawrence D'Oliveiro   wrote:   
   >>On Sat, 1 Jun 2024 19:11:43 -0000 (UTC), Spiros Bousbouras wrote:   
   >>   
   >>> Scripting language , not macro language.   
   >>   
   >>In Emacs, there is no difference: the macro language is the scripting   
   >>language.   
   >   
   > I don't care about "Emacs", but there *is* a difference.   
   >   
   > Vim has both - a macro langauge and a scripting language - and they are   
   > different things that do different things.   
   >   
   > In fact, Vim has many different scripting languages - including a brand new   
   > one in Vim9 - that I know next to nothing about.   
      
   Interesting. I read some more about languages in vi and clones. It seems   
   that there is still the old "ex" style (giving commands with ":" as   
   prefix). This of course was very limited, so VimL or Vim script extended   
   this (YASL, Yet Another Scripting Language) in a more powerful, but   
   quite ideosyncratic way. Vim9 script tries to sanitize the language   
   somewhat (and includes compilation to byte code), but in the meantime   
   Neovim was forked, which includes Lua as extension language.   
      
   (Please excuse if this brief and cursory summary is way off, it was   
   written by an outsider with feet firmly planted in Emacs country. Feel   
   free to correct/comment.)   
      
   From my Emacs point of view, this all seems quite familiar. Emacs had   
   very early a very capable Lisp (which was a much more common language   
   back then) dialect for extension, which spawned tons of packages, to the   
   point that package managers and package repository servers were   
   necessary.   
      
   So no need to reinvent the editor wheel if you are unhappy, just extend   
   Emacs. I assume that this very early powerful extensibility caused Emacs   
   fans to go wild with configuration, while the more mundane extensibility   
   caused vi fans to stay more vanilla (sane?). This might apply to   
   veterans more than to newbies who came to scene later, when Vimscripting   
   was already firmly established. The posts of Anthony and Janis at least   
   point into this direction.   
      
   Years later, when even Emacs Lisp was perceived as too limiting by some   
   hackers, discussion about replacing Emacs Lisp by something even more   
   capable (Scheme, in form of the Guile dialect, or Common Lisp). This has   
   led to some new branches/rewrites/dead ends.   
      
   Now the "Eastern Orthodox Editors" I referred to else-thread were   
   extended using Rexx, also a quite fully-fledged language, and, back in   
   the days, rather common on OS/2 and Amiga. This choice, however, even   
   though there seem to be quite a lot of programmed extensions, obviously   
   has not prevented a slow dying of these editors, maybe because the   
   critical mass was too small from the start.   
      
   In my professional context (simulation of structural mechanics) the   
   situation is similar: There were tools with proprietary extension   
   languages (typically rather crippled) and others with more   
   common/powerful/generic ones (Lisp, Tcl, Python). The former tools over   
   the decades have often changed to these "better" languages as well.   
      
   From a business point of view, users who invested heavily in   
   customizing/extending a tool (because it is easy with a well-chosen   
   language) will not run to other tools as easily. This can ensure   
   live-long loyalty.   
      
   Best regards   
      
   Axel   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)