Subject: Re: bug#66706: [PATCH] Automatic elisp dialect insertion

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2023 07:48:19 -0400

>> But because having two dialects imposes an undue burden on our users.
>> Those who read all the docs may not care, but all the others are
>> vulnerable to the usual "I copied the code from that webpage and it
>> doesn't work" because the code on that webpage used the other dialect.
> I find this categorical dismissal of the intellectual or problem-solving
> capacity, and perhaps fortitude if you will, of Emacs users very
> patronizing, needless to say with my Emacs user hat on.

There's no patronizing, here.  Just experience.  It *is* a source of
confusion.  I've seen enough such examples during my time in SX where
people give a valid answer, followed by comments like:

   "doesn't work here" --Mr.Foo
   "I assumed you have lexical-binding enabled, try enabling it and see
    if it works" --Mr.Bar

Sometimes the original poster tried to avoid the problem by including
the `-*- lexical-binding:t -*-` cookie in his snippet, but the other
user just copied that snippet to his existing file so the cookie didn't
end up on the first line.

I don't doubt that our users have the capacity to solve those problems.
It's just that my sadism is already satisfied by all the other problems
we foist on them.

I myself get bitten by the different dialects every once in a while,
sometimes even copying code within Emacs itself (typically taking
a chunk of code from a buffer and running it inside `M-:` or `M-x
ielm`).

> Furthermore, it is quite dubitable that minor customizations of the
> sort found on most web pages are suceptible to influence by the type
> of variable binding used.

And yet.

        Stefan