You know, typed clojure is pretty excellent.

http://typedclojure.org

Mm, it has tremendous shortcomings. A lot of pro shops can't use it any more.

orly? Based purely on the number of searches made for Facebook?

This is a terrible, baseless prediction that should not be published by the guardian or linked to Hacker News.

I second emacs occur.

This is true, and much of that C is spent implementing the lisp interpreter. I'd love to see how much C is used outside that functionality.

The actual Lisp interpreter is rather tiny compared to the other stuff. Just do a 'ls -l *.c | sort -gk 5' in the src directory. By far the largest file is xdisp.c, which is the redisplay engine, and only a handful of people in the world dare to touch it. Next comes input handling (keyboard.c), then then dealing with coding systems, terminals, win32-API, image handling, windows, processes, buffers, and much more. AFAICS the first file to actually deal with Lisp is lread.c and comes in at #21.

The ribbon makes it really easy to use one handed on a 6+

Also the iPod minis.

Don't forget these guys: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lCcb-07Pmcc/TwXJDjDeNJI/AAAAAAAACF...

define "thriving" because I find this hard to believe.

Sure for the Palm market - there were vendors making applications, people buying them, and people buying devices just to run those applications. At the time, you could subscribe to dead-tree magazines that had reviews, advertisements just for Palm devices and applications. The market was large enough to support many companies, and many people buying and selling software.

Even the TRS-80 Model 100 had it's own market for software that was thriving for about three years - complete with requisite magazine support.

...

My hunch is that the new generation of people who recently discovered the recent application ecosystems are shocked to find out that some slightly-older people remember when this same exciting feeling happened before - I would imagine all the way back to the late 1970's when you could put a computer together yourself and sell software out of your garage.

I appreciate the hint that I may be younger than you, but I was involved in the eco-systems around the Sinclair ZX81 and the Spectrum, and later on with DECUS, so I have a pretty good idea how this stuff works.

My point isn't whether or not there's an ecosystem, but whether or not there's a planned ecosystem which is deliberately designed to add value, and created as a conscious strategy - not just something that happens by accident.

I wish people here would stop thinking about technology and think more about the overall user experience - which is not about hardware or software or ecosystems, but about creating gotta-have-that experiences and life-changing tools.

So far I don't see WATCH doing that. It might, and there may be plans, and we'll all be surprised a year from now.

But so far, there's no evidence that Apple are thinking about WATCH in those terms. And that makes it different to previous launches.

This is why I hedged with the word 'significant.' I completely agree that people were making and selling apps for mobile devices before the iPhone came along. Can we both agree that the ecosystem exploded in size and visibility to the general population only after the iPhone was released, though?

That's what happens when something becomes consumer focused rather than (essentially) B2B. Prices go way down, sales go way up. I paid $50 for a Palm app back in the day, and that same app would go for 99c today. That doesn't mean the Palm app marketplace was insignificant or unimportant. Smartphones wouldn't be here if their value wasn't proven with PDAs.

You're quite correct that the market is much broader now - not only are there more consumers, there's more developers.

But to me, this doesn't feel different - just larger.

Even the cycles seem to the same - with early adopters leading the way, the first wave of quick and dirty apps, then more polished apps, and then the tsunami of shovel-ware that kills the market for newcomers.

Remember that the Internet wasn't as big as it is now, and not many people had access.

I remember there being a big market for these devices and apps back in the day.

You could just use magit, right?

I started implementing some of it into magit, but I could never get magit + ediff working in a way I liked more than just invoking ediff myself.

Knowing the thorougness of magit, there's probably a way to successfully do this with minimal customization.

Wow, there are some really cool and unique ideas in this editor. Thank you for sharing.

I am of course so ingrained in the emacs way that I probably will never change editors.

Check out evil-mode in emacs. Its wonderful.

Agreed evil in emacs is very good. It is the best vim emulator I've ever used and is even better than vim in instances (like when it shows you everything you are replacing as you type the replace command).

Lately though, after near a decade of using vim, I've been trying to unlearn vim. Many editors provide easy ways to navigate, search and replace the way you do in vim 80% of the time without all the baggage that modes bring. The baggage that vim creates is muscle memory training to navigate with hjkl which is incompatible with non-vim input boxes. I'm also not a fan of the vim source code or its creator and it may be too late for me to care about neovim.

Another negative aspect of vim is that at least in myself and maybe in others it leads to an unearned increase level of engineering confidence as you master an arguably useless, esoteric skillset that doesn't translate into better understanding of basic computer science topics. Vim does help improve regular expression familiarity, but that may be it.

Main thing for me is most new languages have a large userbase in vim (as well as emacs).

So for example, Clojure has vim-fireplace for an excellent clojure experience. Same thing with Haskell.

Go to where the users are and your life will be easier.

Could you describe your Haskell+vim experience a bit more? Do you have smart autocompletion? How well does it work?

Check out http://haskelllive.com/environment.html

I don't use Syntastic, but haskellmode-vim and ghcmod-vim integrate nicely with ghci, and neco-ghc gives autocompletion.

I don't use tags files or other project-level stuff, the above is good enough to get started.

Also once you have ghcmod-vim you can map a key to tell you the type of an expression:

    au FileType haskell nnoremap <buffer> <F12> :GhcModType<CR>

It does take some work to get all these things installed, however.

I wasn't much a fan last time I tried it. If you know more than the very basic vim movements, you'll find they start conflicting with the emacs keybindings; and it's frustrating to remember which one does which.

In emacs i just gave up and tried to learn vanilla emacs even though i am a vim user.