On one hand, AI boosts Emacs development. On the other hand, as an Emacs user of 30 years, I have always felt that the number of people who deeply grasp Emacs Lisp and Emacs' internals is really small against the population of people merely using Emacs and lightly hacking their own setup, and I worry AI is not going to encourage any growth in that small elite that seems kinda important for Emacs' long-term future.
> AI is not going to encourage any growth in that small elite
In practice we're seeing the biggest waves of development in years. r/emacs gets daily, daily! announcements of new packages. Many of them, if not most, are not some AI-sloped trash - they are very useful. Some package makers go above and beyond - even though vibe-coded, they still show good design decisions, proper tests, hand-written documentation. Canvas stuff most likely wouldn't be possible without LLMs.
This is a good point, but I do want to mention that I feel like in the past 5 years we've had lots of extremely popular packages that hook into Emacs internals instead of rolling out their own architecture.
For example, corfu [0] versus company [1]. Company works with capf, but you can also write your own backends for it (specific to company). Corfu also works with capf, but all backends are capf functions instead of a corfu specific backend.
Another good example is eglot [2] versus lsp-mode [3]. Eglot is actually packaged with Emacs now.
There's also other stuff, like vertico [4] (and others that are recommended to download) versus helm/ivy.
I also want to mention that packages that hook into Emacs more don't necessarily mean that they're better. From my POV it's more like you get a lot more things for free and the documentation you dive into will be Emacs specific instead of package specific. It all comes down to preference.
Vertico/Counsel/Orderless is very nice, but Helm and Ivy are fully featured (I always forget how much Helm has for you).
I use corfu, eglot, and vertico now. I have thought about going back to helm and company, especially since I was very familiar with company's backends for a long time.
> the population of people merely using Emacs and lightly hacking their own setup
This is a good thing. Custom environments should be either minimal or upstream. Anybody should be able to sit down next to you and help you hack out a change. The more unusual/custom your environment is the less productive that is, and this more than balances out any possible gain you can make from custom setups. (don't forget to account for your cost to learn elisp and then make the changes!)
Somebody needs to make the correct setups. However most of us have better things to do.
I'm not advocating for making all (or even most) users spend so much time on internals that they don't get productivity gains. Rather, I'm concerned about maintaining, ensuring generational turnover, and healthily boosting the elite that the product depends on. It is no secret that a number of Emacs ecosystem core devs are middle-aged, and so the project is a few heart attacks or whatever away from losing the experience and competence that has sustained it so well.
Most of emacs is lisp. The actual C part is quite small considering the capabilities of the system. Lisp being what it is, it’s moslty about domain knowledge than language expertise.
I feel the lisp constructed on top needs significant language expertise. Lispy constructs of defvar, defconst, defcustom, alist, cl-loop etc. are quite extensively used in emacs - and need an understanding quite unique to Lisp. Of course, the domain then builds on top of this shared understanding of the contructs themselves.
I would say that loss of expertise in emacs-lisp is a significant loss, even if there continues to exist C-expertise globally.
There's a wealth of packages and the documentation for emacs-lisp is quite extensive. It's not some esoteric language. But what I'm talking about is that the code for the packages can be quite simple and readable.
It's just a Lisp dialect at the end of the day and not much more complicated to learn than Javascript. The only unusual aspect is its prevalent use of dynamic scoping, although nowadays lexical scoping is also available and encouraged AFAIK.
emacs 31+ started emiting this warning for my custom Lisp files:
Warning (files): Missing ‘lexical-binding’ cookie in "~/.emacs.d/custom.el".
You can add one with ‘M-x elisp-enable-lexical-binding RET’.
See ‘(elisp)Selecting Lisp Dialect’ and ‘(elisp)Converting to Lexical Binding’
for more information.
I am still trying to figure out what to do! The manual is quite verbose and I haven't had the patience to go through it yet.
It will add a cookie (lexical-binding) to the top of the file. If you want to do it manually put this:
;; -*- lexical-binding: nil; -*-
or this:
;; -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-
at the top of your custom.el file. They want it to be explicit now because eventually lexical will be the default. If you put in the former then when lexical becomes the default, the file will still use the current dynamic bindings. And if you use the latter, if there are issues you'll discover them now before the default changes and you're surprised by it.
>and I worry AI is not going to encourage any growth in that small elite
I wouldn't dismiss the help of lower friction of entry. Lots of recent Linux and neovim users due to how easy it is to debug an issue or edit a config now.
The larger the regular userbase, the more chances people gradually go deeper into the system.
