The Limits of Lisp Extensibility: A Critique of "100% Lisp" Claims
By
todsacerdoti
Crackles when you bite it. Shows the baker did the work.
Summary
The article critiques the common argument that Lisp-based editors like Emacs offer perfect extensibility because they're written in Lisp. It argues that while Lisp provides good extensibility, it's not unlimited - developers are still constrained by coding conventions, existing code, and the fact that not everything can be extended without breaking functionality. The author provides a concrete example from Org-mode where overriding a function (org-export-get-reference) doesn't work because Org-mode sometimes bypasses it by calling org-html--reference directly.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledCompared to extending via workarounds, extending in 'pure Lisp' can be both easier and harder, as we are still bounded by coding conventions and existing code, and one cannot possibly extend everything without breaking some of them.
It's not wrong, but I think it does overlook a few things.
Oh no! It turns out that, sometimes Org-mode directly calls org-html--reference, bypassing our override.
one of the most common arguments seems to be: 'it's written in This Lisp and also scriptable in This Lisp, and that gives it great extensibility.'
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