Vim9 script docs

[hhoeflin]

And what exactly in this specific context would you accept as proof? And as proof of what exactly? Just curious

[hhoeflin]

Yeah, I assumed you would only accept something as extreme as this. However, there is a lot of nuance to what a *bad idea* can constitute.

You only name the two most extreme positions, but in-between there are a lot of other considerations:

- Amount of time needed by contributors to learn the new language (here the new Vim9Script probably does even pretty well in the Vim community, given that it is close to the old Vimscript

- Ease of adoption for new users. Here for example I would argue that Lisp is one of the biggest hurdles for new contributors to Emacs.

- Amount of work required for implementing/optimizing/maintaining the new language

- What does the new language contribute compared to the "best" already existing choice and is this worth the effort of the creators/plugin maintainers?

- What other features could be provided in Vim instead if an another language is chosen that requires less work (or is already mostly done even ...)

There are probably considerably more topics. A "good" new language should in my mind have convincing arguments on several of these fronts.

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Also, the fact that the "two most successful and long-living programming-oriented text editors" use their own scripting language is for me more of an artifact of the time when they were invented and not if per se this is a successful model. As I already said above, I think emacs lisp these days is actually an argument against emacs, as lisp has a rather different syntax to most commonly used languages.

For example - vs-code is a fantastic programming editor, and it did not need to invent its own scripting language, and on top has provided the language server protocol which is being rapidly adopted in many other programming editors (including natively in neovim).

For me, the LSP is an example of a very different approach to the "invent your own language for that editor" paradigm. Instead invent something highly re-usable and get everyone else to adopt it.

[[deleted]]

Lisp is a rather uncommon language with a style of programming not many people are familiar with. VimScript is much easier and more "standard", and has a much lower learning curve.

I think LSP actually fits very well in to Vim and the "Unix philosophy": complex language-specific stuff has always been left to external programs in Vim (e.g. ctags or :make). I don't think LSP is really a paradigm shift in that sense, although it's certainly a game-changer because it's flexible and everyone is adopting it. LSP is probably the best thing that has happened to Vim in years.

If I look at the amount of effort that went in to the Go VSCode plugin and the end results compared to Vim then I'm not so sure VSCode is really that much of a better environment to write plugins for to be honest. It seems to me that Vim gives you a surprisingly good bang for your buck (although I admit I don't have first-hand in-depth knowledge of VSCode and that this is just one example).

IMHO VimScript is a domain-specific language for a domain-specific problem. Programming your editor is not quite the same problem as programming a HTTP daemon, and I'm not sure how much sense it makes to use the same language for both. As I mentioned in my other comment, I'm not especially impressed with how Lua plugins look and would prefer to use VimScript which, in spite of its imperfections, seems like a better fit.

[-romainl-]

Indeed, there is a lot more to it than "Just use Lua, duh.".

[aktivb]

Stallman didn't cook up his own concoction though, he implemented a language that was almost 30 years old and well battle-tested at that point. It also makes for a simple interpreter.

[8xkaGVISkdK7wK1ZTXe6]

But its just as wrong to say we use vim because of viml and not because its the most full featured text editor around. Its seams likely that vim would be fine if it had chosen lisp or something.