Re: Default lexical-binding to t

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2024 21:23:38 +0000
> Cc: joostkremers@fastmail.fm, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> 
> > > But I do wonder whether the massive time and effort its development
> > > and proliferation have taken up were worth it.
> 
> > This could be said about almost every major feature in Emacs that
> > fundamentally changes the internals.  Are the time, energy, and
> > massive efforts I invested (and am still investing) in bidirectional
> > editing support worth it?  I don't know; there are days when I think
> > it was all a terrible waste.  What about all the multiple changes in
> > the internals that bring us 3.7% speedup in some benchmark?  What
> > about support for Lisp threads?  What about the addition of positions
> > to symbols? in how many error-message situations is this really
> > important?  And XInput2, and touch devices, etc. etc.
> 
> No, the difference is that most major features are implemented by one
> person (or a small team) and are complete in themselves.  Lexical
> binding involved significant effort from lots and lots of contributors,
> each having to modify "his own" files as lexical binding steadily
> morphed from being optional to being compulsory.

That is factually not true.  You seem to compare the contributions to
lexical binding and to the other features with different scales, or
maybe you simply misremember.  Lexical binding is mainly the work of
Stefan, exactly like bidi support is mainly mine.  But in the same
way, many others contributed in both.

As for the need to adapt to changes: it is also common.  My init files
are quite stable, and still I have in them parts that depend on Emacs
versions, and each new major release ends up with additions and
modifications there.  There's nothing surprising here: new releases
bring new variables and features, and OTOH change some defaults which
I don't like, so I need to adapt.  And so do others.

> I still wonder who made the decision to convert the entire code base,
> and when.

We all did.  If you are against this, you are in a tiny minority, and
should probably stop fighting this war, because it was lost long ago.
Trying to argue now against lexical binding is basically a waste of
everyone's time, yours included.  So please let's not go there,
because this issue is not on the table, not for a very long time.

> > Emacs moves forward because someone whom we trust to be an expert in
> > some area or to understand well enough what our users might want has
> > an itch to scratch, not because we have some magic future insight.
> > Hindsight is always 20-20, but it is also unfair, given our
> > development model and the pull of core developers and expertise that
> > we can command.
> 
> I can't remember any discussion of the technical merits and demerits of
> lexical binding taking place on this list.  I've been subscribed for
> over 20 years.  Maybe I missed it.  It seems strange, that's all.

If you don't remember such discussions, then you missed them, yes.  We
had quite a lot of them over the years.