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# Old McCarthy Had a Form
Ian Eure
Name Pronunciation: (EE-un YOU-r)
Pronouns: he/him/his
Preferred contact info: ian@retrospec.tv / ieure on Libera
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Most practical languages are multi-paradigm, offering several
abstractions for the programmer. But did you know that Emacs Lisp
comes with a powerful system for object-oriented programming? Join me
for a discussion of EIEIO, and learn how it can help you write more
modular, flexible Emacs Lisp.
# Discussion
IRC nick: ieure
- I didn't know that custom.el works with EIEIO that way, very nice
- Dang Ian. What a talk, great demos.
- Wow, that's a great talk.
- Great talk. So with that Emacs is on pair with Smalltalk development environments now
- For reference, transient.el, which we all know and love as the engine that drives the magit interface, is written via EIEIO afaik.
- I reckon I should look more into it, I've always avoided it because I was afraid it wouldn't be /quite as nice/ as CLOS or GOOPS.
- ieure: It's missing a few things (most documented in the manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eieio.html#CLOS-compatibility), but it's solid and worth using.
- Yeah when transient.el first came out I was impressed by how naturally it worked as part of that abstraction.
- ieure: EIEIO all the things! I had to cut it, but you can use dynamic dispatch based on major-mode, like: (cl-defmethod whatever ((mode (derived-mode python-mode)))) and then (whatever major-mode).
- Also really nice for things like 'window-system. I really like when callsites are clean and not cluttered with conditionals.
- Can eieio do regexp dispatch?
- ieure: Not currently, but it's possible to add.
- okay, so I don't need to feel too bad about coding up my own vtable for those then
- ieure: This is the thing that implements (thing (eql :whatever)) specialization, should be a good starting point if you want (thing (string-match-p "^foo")): <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/emacs-lisp/cl-generic.el#n1164>
- thanks for the pointer, but I think I have some more pressing cl-defgeneric reimplementations to make before I touch that
- ieure: Extremely fair. One thing I didn't get to touch on is that you can extend generic functions from anywhere. So you don't have to patch up cl-generic.el, you can define a new method for a generic function defined anywhere, in any file. Which rules.
# Outline
- What is EIEIO?
- Why OOP?
- The CLOS Model
- Classes
- Generic Functions
- Methods
- Specialization
- Method Qualifiers
- Multiple Inheritance
- Nice Properties
- Practical Examples
- Encapsulation
- Example: `transmission.el`
- Abstraction
- Example: `sql.el`
- Extensibility
- Example: comint
- Conclusion
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