Re: [sawfish] Re: The dark corners of rep

[Eli Barzilay <eli barzilay org>]

On May 20, Daniel Fetchinson wrote:
> Let me just chime in as a happy sawfish user who has extensive
> programming experience in various languages but does not know
> lisp/scheme/etc at all.
> 
> I'm perfectly happy with rep in sawfish. All I need it for is
> writing not more than 50 lines in my .sawfishrc and it was not hard
> to learn it for this purpose given the tons of rep files coming with
> sawfish.  They can be used as an example.

[Just to clarify the difference -- I know lisp and scheme very well (I
make my living mostly in scheme), and my .sawfishrc is almost at 1k
lines.]


> The fact that rep is not lisp/scheme/whatever doesn't bother me. In
> fact I couldn't care less. [...]  If someone doesn't know
> lisp/scheme/etc than he/she will not care that rep is different.

Of course -- if I haven't made that clear then I apologize: the
difference is for people who write code -- and even more for people
who maintain it.  So you would care very much if something got broken
and nobody knows how to fix it, or if you wanted some new feature
which nobody knows how to write.  The bottom line is that the number
of expert Scheme/Lisp/ELisp hackers, as small as that may be, is
significantly bigger than the number of expert rep hackers.  Make
writing, debugging, and maintaining code easier for them, and you get
more hacking resources into sawfish.  (And, of course, if you're happy
with how sawfish is right now -- no bugs, and no extensions desired,
then you wouldn't care about this as much too.)


> All in all, since rep has been used so successfully in sawfish I
> think it's completely misguided to suggest that it should be
> replaced by something else just because it's different than the
> favorite language of somebody.

Yes, I completely agree with that.  The argument should be what I
wrote above, not that it's different.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!