Evolution of Emacs Lisp [pdf]

Elisp is awesome! Emacs is truly an <i>integrated</i> development environment also thanks to this great extension language.<p>This paper provides a nice overview of past and also very recent language developments. For example, support for <i>bignums</i> (Section 7.3) is one of the most exciting new features.<p>Thank you very much for putting this together, and for all your work on Emacs!

Emacs has a function for transforming a window of text under ROT13, <i>rot13-other-window</i>. The Emacs manual [1] says, &quot;For example, a review of a film might use rot13 to hide important plot points.&quot; This example was added in 2012. The source code [2], on the other hand, gives a different use case: &quot;ROT13 encryption is sometimes used on USENET as a read-at-your-own-risk wrapper for material some might consider offensive, such as ethnic humor.&quot; This comment was added no later than 1992.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;Rmail-Rot13.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;Rm...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;emacs-mirror&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;rot13.el" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;emacs-mirror&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;rot13...</a>

&gt;During the early years of Emacs, the main complaints from users about the simple mark&amp;sweep algorithm were the GC pauses. These were solved very simply in Emacs 19.31 by removing the messages that indicated when GC was in progress. Since then complaints about the performance of the GC have been rare. Most of them have to do with the amount of time wasted in the GC during initialization phases, where a lot of data is allocated without generating much garbage.<p>At 300 baud, I bet the GC messages took longer to display than the GC itself.

If you don&#x27;t have time, just read the condlusion, it&#x27;s <i>very</i>inspiring for all of us who are &quot;individuals who code for the benefit of others&quot;

Nice that they go over XEmacs time period, it was my favorite variant, as it provided better GUI tooling support back then.

Does anyone have a non-PDF version of this available?<p>PDFs are terrible on mobile.

I use emacs all the time, but I don&#x27;t really extend it. More recent editors are extensible via web tech such as javascript, which sadly often comes at the price of having an electron base. Javascript does have the advantage that you can console.log() everything and discover functions easily for a given object. I still don&#x27;t know how to discover stuff when I need it in elisp except M-X apropos which often fails to find something useful.