A view from the hill

Steve Yegge blogs about XEmacs needs to die and I would like to add my own little comment on the issue. First, perhaps some background: I'm a long-term XEmacs user, since about 1995, I think. I started hacking Elisp around 1996, implementing a major mode for the Otter theorem prover and various other stuff. Since 1997 or so, I had been somewhat active on the xemacs-beta mailing list, reporting build successes/failures, participating in discussions etc. and even writing an article on the then-new XEmacs port to Windows in the german iX magazine. So, perhaps, I'm a bit biased towards XEmacs. That I've been using XEmacs instead of Emacs had a lot to do with two factors: at my university, the local Emacs guru used XEmacs and provided a very complete configuration to start with. To start hacking Prolog source didn't require any configuration on my side at all. When I tried to re-establish that configuration on my own linux box, using Gnu Emacs was totally out of the question, which is basically the second reason: XEmacs came with a lot of batteries included, whereas Gnu Emacs only came with a directly dying low battery at best. And third, the XEmacs interface experience was a lot friendlier than with the naked Gnu Emacs.

Now, at the time I was actively following XEmacs development, XEmacs had a whole lot of man power behind it, with lively discussions and an exciting movement of adding new features. At the same time, RMS discussed switching Gnu Emacs to Guile (a scheme dialect), which me, as a Common Lisp user, scared me off even more. Around 2002 or so, my spare time for XEmacs dropped to zero, so I unsubscribed the development mailing list and was just a happy user. Until two seemingly unrelated things happened: first of all, Unicode was no longer to be ignored and it was obvious that the Mule (multiple languages for emacs or some such) for XEmacs wasn't up to the task, especially not on Windows. That was quite a problem for me back then with the then current stable XEmacs 21.4. Now, six years later, XEmacs 21.5 is still not there (aka released as the new stable version) and it's unicode support still sucks (not so much as it did, say, two years ago, but it still fails a lot of tests from Markus Kuhn unicode test suite). The second development was that the Emacs team, which I had only barely been aware of previously, somehow gained a enourmous momentum and catched up a lot of ground, where XEmacs had been the leader by far. In particular, as of Emacs 22, nobody in its sane mind could argue against the fact that the current Emacs handles Unicode etc. far better than XEmacs (this is especially true for XEmacs 21.4 on Windows, but even the current beta XEmacs 21.5-b28 on Unix isn't where it should be). This seems to be directly related to the fact that a lot of the key developers of the end of the last century no longer actively participate in XEmacs development. I think only few people from the XEmacs crowd would argue against the impression that XEmacs development has more or less cringed to a halt and the distribution of development power between Emacs and XEmacs development is nowadays reversed to the situation from the 90s.

That being said, I still stick with XEmacs. Last time I tried using Gnu Emacs (that's the Emacs 22 from Ubuntu Hardy), I still found that I'm far more accustomed with the XEmacs intrinsics on how to perform specific actions than with how it works in Emacs. And I never got around to clean up my mess of configuration files to properly support the various flavours plus adding the extension libraries that still don't ship with Emacs (Slime, for instance). Finally, with more and more users switching to Emacs, there has to be someone reporting problems,

Now, back to Steves blog post: I think he has some valid points in it, but for the most part I disagree. First of all, while I agree that Eclipse and similar IDEs are still not at the greatest enemy to Emacs (regardless of flavour). I'm currently again using Eclipse at work and it's a pain finding out how to properly associate an unknown file extension with some specific editor (mode). And it's a memory hog that results in unbelievable handling (on my dual core 2GB equipped desktop) that is even worse than my first XEmacs experience on my 486/33 with 8MB ram in 1995. Eight megs and constantly swapping? Hah! I can't believe that even today I have to hear that Emacsen would be too complicated, given that for any task/configurations I spend endless time searching/clicking through the gazillions of settings in Eclipse.

However, I also don't believe that a marriage between Emacs and some web-browser is the way to go. There are much more pressing issues to move Emacs into the next century than switching from Elisp to <whatever>. If you're interested in extending your editor, you have to learn about the way how to do that. But that is totally independent from the question which editor you're going to use in the first place.
What is a much more pressing need in my opinion is finally implementing multi-tasking for the (X)Emacs core. Still being locked in a single-threaded application model is sooo 1990s. It's not becoming more and more ridicuosly, it's utterly unbelievable.

In one other point, though, Steve is right on track: the divergence between APIs is becoming a bigger problem with every passing day. I think it's very unfortunate that a) Emacs developers don't let them inspire by the existing APIs in XEmacs and vice versa and b) that there are too few XEmacs developers that merge current Emacs enhancement into the XEmacs codebase (the other way 'round is always problematic due to license issues).

So, before I would consider pursuing a major architectural change like XUL or some such for Emacs, I would first work on the much lower-hanging fruit of narrowing the gap between the two flavours. It's a pity I myself only have the spare time to write such blog posts instead of actively working on code towards that goal.

In case you're interested in continuation-based web development with Common Lisp, it might be of interest to learn that Drew Campsie has voluntered to take over UCW development. Marco Baringer, initiator and maintainer of UncommonWeb (aka UCW) seemed somwhat relieved that finally somebody with more time on his hand steps up to take over.

That Marco hadn't had the time to keep pushing UCW is quite obvious from the mailing list archive. Lately Attila Lendvai seemed to me (an innocent external observer) to had pushed UCW foreward, however, as he Attila announced, he wants to go into a different direction than Drew.

I've been using ucw-dev during the last two years and the current situation really called for a change, in my opinion. UCWs main problem, as I observe it, is lacking documentation and clearly stated goals which way UCW will go. The automatically extracted documentation doesn't contain information how the bits fit together and all tutorials are a) incomplete, b) outdated as far as they are targetting ucw-dev, whereas development has mainly happened in ucw-ajax. However, it was not all clear that ucw-ajax really would become the main line of UCW.

I like UCWs component architecture a lot and will eagerly follow what is going to happen. With two prominent developers such as Marco and Attila more or less leaving the project, it will be interesting to see with how much activity development will happen from now on.

Dell is selling Ubuntu equipped systems since about a year now and seems to be quite happy with it. Whatever that effectively means, at least I can tell that I'm quite happy with Linux on Dell systems, too.

Through the last five years, I've been using Linux on a number of Dell systems. Under my personal control there have been three laptops (Dell C610, D610 and a Latitude 640) and a desktop (Optiplex 755), on which I have been running Debian Sarge, Ubuntu Dapper, Feisty and now Hardy. We also had several Dell servers at work running more or less smoothly with Debian (sarge, etch). Using Linux wasn't always without problems: I had trouble with built-in modems, PCMCIA ISDN cards and acpi/hibernation. For example, on my private Latitude 640, I have trouble suspending at all, because of the ipw3945 driver for the wlan. But the important thing to note is that basically all problems were really small and never of a size requiring me to use some other OS in the first place.

The only real issue is not with Dell per se, but more with my favourite OS, Debian: over the years, and especially with the ever-lasting sarge release, getting Debian to run on a recent system got more and more difficult. That's the main reason why I've been using Ubuntu on all recent hardware I had contact with: it's more or less (more so than less) a Debian system but does run on modern hardware. Main issues here were graphics adapters, sata/scsi hostadapters and network/wifi cards, or to put it otherwise: too old kernels, too old X.org. Both problem sources can simply be solved by using a recent version of Ubuntu. Sorry, Debian, but your release cycle is just too long to be acceptable. Granted, all these problems are mostly an issue when installing a new system, but it's not always possible to plug in some old disc with a working version of Linux.

Recent fun:
- Working hibernate/suspend without any manual configuration on a brand new Dell desktop using Ubuntu 8.04 (beta).
- Watching a self-generated video CD (probably done under Windows) under Linux without any problem with my wife that we couldn't watch on Windows due to scrambled colours under Windows media player.

Recent less fun:
- Hibernate/suspend on our older Dell laptop with Ubuntu 7.10 and finding it's a known issue with the ipw3945 driver.
- Getting vmware to work on a recent 2.6.24 system.
- Having fixed that finding out the hard way that Aero won't display in the VM, requiring to go back to cloning the (not so small) physical machine a third time.
- Being unable to get a DHCP lease over the rt2x00 driver for my USB wlan stick with kernel 2.6.24, despite being able to get a sucessful connect via wpa_supplicant/wext.