Distel, the other way around

[Joachim Durchholz]

Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:

> I think I am not alone when I wish there was a nicer interface to Erlang than
> the shell, visually and functionally. Distel is a great tool, but what I'd like
> to see is more like how Mozart/Oz does it: the integration is tighter, and there
> are colors ;-)

It's a nice interface.

> This is why I thought: why not use Distel the other way around, to drive Emacs
> from Erlang. If we can call Emacs functions from Erlang, then we can build a
> nice front-end.

Urk. Emacs, while certainly powerful, is pretty much unusable to the 
average Windows programmer. If you want to lose all market share of 
Erlang on the Windows platform, make this the standard interface. 
(Actually this is was one of the major limiting factors for my 
productivity on Mozart/Oz - I had all intentions of learning Emacs in 
the process, but doing this at the same time as learning Mozart/Oz 
proved to be too distracting, so I was stuck at a quite basic level of 
Emacs expertise and productivity.)

Better devote the developer resources to other things (like building 
better front-ends).

Or, if integration with Emacs is a must, add integration with other IDEs 
at the same time (MS Visual Studio comes to mind, and this Borland 
thingie that I forgot the name of). And keep these integrations 
up-do-date - it's no use if the initial release supports all kinds of 
IDE, and all but one are left unmaintained after that.

Just my 2c.

Regards,
Jo