

About elnode - EmacsLisp version of node.js - nicferrier
http://nic.ferrier.me.uk/blog/2010_10/elnode

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dougws
This is extremely cool. There have been a few other Emacs webserver
implementations, but none showing this much promise/active development. I'm
really excited to see where this goes!

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peterb
I can't wait to see this progress when emacs gets lexical scope and threading.
Having a lisp machine as an asynchronous web server is amazing.

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p4bl0
Yep, this can already be done using Scheme (Racket or Guile) and Geiser.

But it's still very cool to have that in Emacs Lisp. And it will be "natively"
here when Emacs Lisp is replaced by Guile 8-).

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spooneybarger
emacs lisp being replaced by guile long ago reached the "I'll believe it when
I see it point".

But hey, duke nuke'em forever did happen, someday perl 6 might be released,
guile might replace emacs lisp.

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nicferrier
I believe someone is working on an emacs in guile. That's the right approach.
I don't believe it's necessary or sensible myself. I like Scheme a lot. But
Emacs resembles CommonLISP more than Scheme so for Emacs future CommonLISP
seems the most sensible option.

Anyway, we're ages away from any of that. Although I do believe we'll see a
more capable LISP inside Emacs within a few years now.

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eschulte
I believe there is a google summer of code project to this effect, but as has
been said previously in this thread "I'll believe it when I see it".

I think it more likely that Emacs-Lisp will continue to grow on its own
incorporating its own threading support and continually reducing the
motivations for a rebase overtop of Guile.

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icey
This could be nice for remote pair programming without having to do screen
sharing.

For instance, the person on the non-typing end could see the edit stream over
their iPad.

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nicferrier
And that's exactly what I'm working on right now. It won't quite be an
etherpad because doing constant diff is not a trivial thing... but bi-
directional "live" editing session over the web will be possible.

I am a couple of weeks away from having something.

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gruseom
The author brings up the idea of an Etherpad for Emacs. I agree that this
would be useful. I wonder how tricky it would be to get right.

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naner
<http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing>

It has been tried a few times.

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nicferrier
It has. One of the things that prompted me to do this is that all the other
attempts seem constrained in ways that were not really useful to me.

An HTTP based tool will never offer the full power of emacs at the remote end.
But it could be more than enough for most circumstances.

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technomancy
> One of the things that prompted me to do this is that all the other attempts
> seem constrained in ways that were not really useful to me.

Running inside tmux seems pretty near perfect for the kind of stuff I do. What
are you looking for that tmux doesn't address? Is it just being able to run on
machines without ssh, because that seems like a pretty minor edge case.

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nicferrier
ok. interesting you think that. I do extensive team development with gnu
screen but there are still times when I am trapped in my X window and behind
my firewall and bringing someone into my machine would be an extensive job.

What I'm working on has 2 use cases:

1\. sharing document editing from inside your local machine's emacs with
someone else on the Internet (this includes things like quick code review or
any of the use cases for etherpad) 2\. sharing data from your emacs with the
Internet in some way, for example with a mobile app. The current mobile apps
for emacs data all have to rebuild the application logic all the time, well,
an elnode based org-mode app wouldn't have to do that (for example). In the
article I also use the example of the diary.

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probably
Cool stuff! But diary format is proprietary?

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bergie
Proprietary can mean other things than actual license. If a format is only
supported by one application, it can still be considered proprietary.

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swah
We have gone too far.

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nicferrier
nah. what can be done will be done. besides... it has it's uses.

of course, I would say that.

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pavpanchekha
Who wants Emacs on Eggshells?

