For work projects, I often have to jump around a lot of XML files referenced in one another by name. The files follow a strict naming convention, but it’s one that looks like gibberish to human eyes. Typing them is difficult and prone to error; plus there are so many files in a given project that navigating a visual tree of the directory isn’t much easier.
So I wrote a small library for Emacs to find and open a file in the directory tree, if the cursor is over a string of text that matches a valid filename in the convention. I’m embarrassed to admit this took me two full days (a few other functions were in the library too). The only previous exposure to Emacs Lisp I had was tweaking my .emacs file, so I had to learn the language as well as hunt down the right functions to call for what I wanted. The work is paying off: it feels 10x’s easier to navigate project files now.
I experimented with trying to do this in Komodo Edit, a popular editor among coworkers, but it involved learning Mozilla’s XUL and Komodo’s own API, as well as writing javascript (yuck), so I abandoned that effort pretty quickly.
I didn’t think I would like Lisp, but the experience has been pretty fascinating, and I’m now making my way through the Practical Common Lisp book by Peter Seibel. It’s interesting learning a language that’s half a century old (!), and that’s influenced so many contemporary languages. One might think that there’s nothing there worth learning or revisiting, but that is so wrong. In particular, I’m trying to wrap my head around the power of Lisp macros and the way they allow you to create new syntactic abstractions. The idea of extending the very language itself, rather just adding new functions, is mind-boggling, to say the least. And, from what I understand, it remains fairly unique to Lisp in spite of the flood of new languages in the past few decades.
It’s disheartening not being able to find much info about who actually uses Lisp anymore, aside from hackers building modules for Emacs. Paul Graham has a cool essay, “Beating the Averages”, about using Lisp to build online store software that Yahoo eventually acquired. And ITA software, which makes an airfare search engine that powers the entire travel industry, uses Lisp. But aside from these bits of info, there isn’t much out there in the way of Lisp “success stories.”