---
title: "EmacsConf 2019"
date: 2019-11-03T15:40:09+05:30
-lastmod: 2019-11-03T15:40:09+05:30
+lastmod: 2019-11-04T15:40:09+05:30
tags : [ "free-software", "emacs" ]
categories : [ "conferences" ]
layout: post
of work (e.g. org-mode has 120k lines of elisp). The importance of concurrency
and parallelism in the new language is also stressed.
-### Replacing Shell Scripts?
-
-One of the talks was about trying to automate tasks using Elisp as a replacement
-for shell scripts (Emacs as my Go To Script Language - Howard Abrams). The idea
-is interesting but probably wouldn't entice a Perl hacker to try and use Elisp.
-I have done this myself in the past but the speaker went a bit further in
-building a framework for doing ad-hoc text processing and piping using Emacs.
-The hard reality is that text processing using macros or Elisp is very slow as
-compared to using a Python or Perl script.
-
-### Miscellaneous
+## Miscellaneous
Most of the talks were about how people were using Emacs in their daily life and
about the cool applications they built on top of Emacs.
Just like the Quake-inspired terminals Guake and Yakuake, there's one called
[Equake](https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/equake) that launches a drop-down eshell.
-You can also use the racket shell called rash, which is crazy powerful. This has
+You can also use the racket shell called Rash, which is crazy powerful. This has
very good integration with StumpWM.
+### Accessibility
+
There was a talk by Parham Doustdar, a blind developer who uses Emacs as his
daily driver. There were some interesting insights on how neglecting
accessibility in applications seriously impacts the productivity of
W3C is doing some work to improve accessibility in browsers, most HTML is
rendered by client-side JavaScript these days which makes life even more
difficult for blind users.
+
+### Replacing Shell Scripts?
+
+One of the talks was about trying to automate tasks using Elisp as a replacement
+for shell scripts (Emacs as my Go To Script Language - Howard Abrams). The idea
+is interesting but probably wouldn't entice a Perl hacker to try and use Elisp.
+I have done this myself in the past but the speaker went a bit further in
+building a framework for doing ad-hoc text processing and piping using Emacs.
+The hard reality is that text processing using macros or Elisp is very slow as
+compared to using a Python or Perl script.
+
+### Language Server Protocol
+
+I've always imagined non-IDE editors like Emacs to be ideal for programming in
+scripting languages. I tried using Emacs for Scala or Java earlier, but always
+end up switching back to IntelliJ. I think the new LSP implementation for Java
+is a game-changer. Though I am not a big fan of Java, it is the open-source
+language that competes with Microsoft C# and has a lot of Apache projects
+written in it. Being able to use Emacs for Java programming with all the
+features of an IDE is definitely a big win for free software. Kotlin doesn't
+have LSP support yet. Maybe it's a conflict of interest for JetBrains.
+
+The conference had an excellent live-coding demonstration of LSP by Torstein
+Krause Johansen in his presentation titled "How Emacs became my awesome Java
+editing environment".
+
+## Diversity
+
+The conference seemed to have a good racial mix of speakers. There was a blind
+speaker too. I am happy to see some representation from non-programmers among
+the speakers. The conference can do better in terms of gender diversity.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+The conference was totally worth losing a night's sleep over. I had to stay up
+till 5 am due to timezone differences. I am now more motivated to write some
+Elisp myself and customize Emacs to my specific needs.
projects / blog.git / blobdiff