this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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How to show what separates emacs from other IDEs (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Both_Confidence_4147@alien.top to c/emacs
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I talked to someone about the extensibility of emacs, but the person I was speaking to assumed that any IDE is just as extensible by using Plug Ins.

Without turning the conversation into a university style lecture, what is one or two simple actions I can do in emacs to show someone what separates it from other IDES.

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[–] Psionikus@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Emacs is a programmable interface to a computer. While it is frequently used to program itself to program other things, it is a foundational bootstrap tool.

IDE's seek to present a set of features that fills that domain of work. You hit a ceiling in that world. With Emacs, you continue molding it to things you get value out of years and decades later, after that IDE went away when its most popular language or framework went into decline.

In the upcoming landscape of AI's with more well-defined type interfaces and symbolic representations, tools like Emacs will be at the forefront of composing these tools into the long tail of cottage industries of what will amount to a revolution in IP, programming, and human-computer interfaces.

[–] Both_Confidence_4147@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good explanation, but the keyword is to "show" not tell

[–] Psionikus@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Have them show their IDE's scripting environment and how they can quickly prototype an automation for something annoying without even going the distance to write a full plugin and then bind that automation to a key.

Then open org or something and show how you can write a version of Lispy for org outlines based on some predicates like org-at-heading-p.