Thoughts on language-level configuration support?

[jfager]

On Mar 31, 3:08 am, rustom <rustompm... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am not sure I understand your solution.

Any questions, please ask.


> I certainly think that the
> problem is big, very much bigger than is appreciated.
> Think of the hoopla in the RoR world about convention-over-
> configuration.

Certainly, it's a big problem.  I'm not saying this will solve it
completely, or anything like that.  I just want to identify the most
common, basic needs that can be solved once and provided as a service
to the programmer and the end user, and to get rid of some of the
repetitive work around dealing with configuration.



> On the other hand I feel that emacs is becoming messier and messier
> because it has taken up something like your idea.  Originally there
> was only setq (lisp for assignment).  Now there is the whole customize-
> mess.  Then again I guess its not the idea that is wrong but its
> current state of implementation.  To elaborate on this mess would be
> too OT for this list.  Nevertheless its a good starting point for the
> kind of thing you are talking of.

I don't think emacs is a great parallel, for a couple of reasons.
First, the customize system seems weird and out of place in a world
where the entrenched configuration mechanism is 'program it directly
in your .emacs file' - by the time you know enough emacs to be able to
improve the customize interface, you don't want to use it anymore.
Also, the lack of namespacing in elisp means there's not a great way
to automatically name and organize these points, so again it falls to
the individual programmers to decide, and they inevitably decide on
something slightly different from each other.