Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!talos!kjones
From: kjones@talos.uucp (Kyle Jones)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: getris.el -- clone of a famous Russian game program.
Message-ID: <1989Sep26.152626.20021@talos.uucp>
Date: 26 Sep 89 15:26:26 GMT
References:  <468@idacrd.UUCP>
Reply-To: kjones@talos.uu.net
Lines: 15

David desJardins writes:
 > Have we gotten carried away yet?  Anyone for implementing X Window in
 > Emacs Lisp?  Seriously, it's very hard for me to understand the
 > philosophy behind implementing real-time interactive games inside of
 > emacs.  It's like writing multi-thousand-line shell and awk scripts
 > (and, yes, I know people who do that too).

I think people do it simply because they can.  Emacs-Lisp is a very
seductive programming environment.  All the programming scutwork (memory
management, terminal I/O, display management, general error handling and
so forth) has already been taken care of.  The language has a very
simple syntax and semantics, and is interpreted fast enough to allow
surprisingly complex thing to be done.  Almost every task performed on
computers reduces to modifying one or more files, so it makes sense to
do these things completely within a text editor.