Most interesting comment (on web browsers):<p>> [...] starting around two decades ago, there was an explosion in the complexity of browsers as companies wanted to have more and more control over exactly what would appear on a user's screen. So they invented lots of features to control that, features where the user couldn't really customize how something would actually appear because the whole point was that the company could control that. And JavaScript was sort of the ultimate level of "the company controls everything." Because of this, going beyond the simple level of web page formatting features in Emacs is basically heading down a path that leads to subjugation. It's a path that we need to stay away from. It's a path to an unjust world of computing that you can easily see around you. Web browsers nowadays are designed to display ads that you may not want to see. They're designed for DRM. They're designed for companies to snoop on you in unobvious ways. And all of that we should protect ourselves from, protect our users from.
Am I the only one who thinks it's entirely obvious that JS is a bad idea for emacs? The beauty of emacs is that it's all in lisp. All of it, except a small C core which is mostly just the elisp implementation. If you don't like lisp, why on earth would you use emacs? There's an absolute fuckton of editors out there that support Javascript.<p>I don't even care what RMS' argument was, I think he's pretty out of touch most of the time. But putting Javascript in Emacs is just a stupid idea that would completely ruin it eventually. Let Emacs be Emacs and Vscode be Vscode.
On one hand, I'm aware that most of what he's saying is wildly divorced from the vast majority of tech reality.<p>That being said: I never want him to stop or change. I still find his ideas and notions incredibly valuable and extremely good sticking points to always consider seriously, even if (perhaps ESPECIALLY IF) there's not much of chance one could actually practice them.<p>I've learned to listen to him before I judge strongly.
Since it is not mentioned in the title or any of the comments (yet), thought it would be useful to say that this talk is by Richard Stallman and is from 2 days ago.
I find the idea of wanting a WYSIWYG doc editor in emacs a bit out of left field. I wish he went into a bit more how he envisions that working.<p>Would emacs developer builds some form a GUI toolkit or would it be built inside the existing concept of text buffers?<p>Seems odd and a bit unfocused, and seems like a big wasted engineering effort for when something like LibreOffice exists.
I do not use Emacs, although I can still comment, about the specific things they mentioned.<p>They are right it does not have to be VS Code; if you like that, then you can use VS Code. However, if you want specific features, then that is a different thing, and will have to be considered specifically.<p>If you want JavaScript in Emacs, it could be an external extension, maybe; it probably should not be included by default. However, if the model is different enough from Lisp then it might be hard to fit; nevertheless, such an extension might help if you need to run JavaScript codes designed for other editors that do use JavaScripts, without having to rewrite them (polyfills will be possible, if necessary). Lisp alone probably isn't ideal though, and you should be allowed to write extensions in C as well (I don't know if this is already possible; maybe it is).<p>WYSIWYG editing should have "reveal-codes" function also; without such thing, WYSIWYG isn't very good.<p>One thing I think would want to have in text editor is capability of non-Unicode text encodings which don't convert to/from Unicode. You just should not expect that everything is conversion in one unified character set; it does not really work.
No disrespect to Stallman, but it's hard for me to understand what problem he's trying to solve here. Various unofficial packages have made Emacs usable to me in my work as a software engineer, which combined with Emacs's unparalleled text editing capabilities and keyboard shortcuts make it a powerful tool indeed. Without many of those unofficial packages, I would be forced to use VS Code or some alternative.<p>In my observation, Emacs has been moving in the right direction, addressing outdated aspects and sources of lagging performance, and adding essential features like LSP support natively. I hope that Emacs contributors and maintainers can keep this focus.
> Namely, it's [javascript] been adopted as a way for a network server to send a program to your machine without your even noticing, so that this program, written by you don't know who, will run on your computer and do you don't know what.<p>Is there any practical difference between running obfuscated Javascript or compiled WebAassembly and running an closed source binary blob?
All I want for Emacs is support for proportional fonts. I don’t care if it’s a major hack, and I don’t want rich text or WYSIWYG. Just proportional fonts.
So the video ends with him asking for questions, which presumably he himself answers... are those posted somewhere?<p>Edit: seems like it's this <a href="https://pad.emacsconf.org/2022-rms" rel="nofollow">https://pad.emacsconf.org/2022-rms</a> but it's not complete (yet?)
Welp... he hates JavaScript because of things he thinks he knows about JavaScript even though he's stating he knows nothing about JavaScript. Then he continues to ramble on about how browsers run JavaScript.<p>Someone so influential, and who sets the ethical standards for free software, should really do their homework.