Microsoft is building something described as "Emacs.Net". The speculation is that it's an Emacs-like edit with the elisp replaced by .NET languages. Yeah well fine, but what people forget is that most of the utility of Emacs is written in 25+ of years of elisp code. Changing the language would be easy, rewriting all the packages is the hard part.
2 comments:
MS has the rich and extensible Visual Studio, and emacs.net would hugely overlap, so what's their motive?
Emacs isn't just a text editor, it's a friggin' 50-ton metaphor. That one little word captures the entire OSS spirit, Richard Stallman, bad takeout food, the GPLs, comp-sci nerdhood, and benevolent hacking. By mentioning the emacs metaphor, MS is carefully targeting a particular audience. It's exactly like Huckabee mentioning some bible mumbo-jumbo.
Linux is another 50-ton metaphor with essentially the same meaning as emacs, but "emacs" != "linux". By channeling the emacs metaphor, MS hopes to defang the OSS community while avoiding any mention of its true competitive threat, linux. Tactically, MS will release emacs.net under an extremely flexible open source license that the OSS community will adore. For the price of a dozen developers, MS will have bought off a big chunk of its enemy. It's not a bad strategy at all. And if it fails, they've lost almost nothing.
(Full disclaimer: this post written in emacs running on debian linux)
You're reading way too much into this. Emacs.net was a "rough description". If you've got an environment like .Net and want to build dev tools, Emacs isn't a bad model to emulate. Interactive environments are great to, you know...interact with. Now that other languages are starting to catch up to lisp (well Smalltalk did too on this front) why not try a self-referential dev environment? MS isn't "channeling the emacs metaphor"; a hiring manager is trying to vaguely describe a project he's trying to staff.
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