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becoming a developer [was: Re: Issues with emacs]


From: ken
Subject: becoming a developer [was: Re: Issues with emacs]
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:03:43 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0.4) Gecko/20120424 Thunderbird/10.0.4



On 06/25/2012 02:02 PM Sivaram Neelakantan wrote:
On Sun, Jun 24 2012,ken  wrote:


[snipped 37 lines]

5. Make the elisp documentation and tutorials so easy and fun to learn
that tons of people actually want to write code.


That'll be the day! :-)




  sivaram

Sivaram,

People familiar with C say it's a difficult language. But I guess they never tried it. You can pick up a book on it and if you give it a little bit of time every day, you can learn enough in a week to write interesting and working programs. And it's fun. Shell programming like bash and ksh are easy and fun too. C++ too, but to a lesser degree. But elisp.... I tried repeatedly over more than ten years to learn it, bought and read a couple books on it, did some tutorials, of course spent a lot of time in the docs, but it wasn't until just a few years ago (and with a lot of help from this list) that I was able to write my first elisp program. I started a second one last year and I'm still plodding really slow through it (but not often). It takes so long to get things to work that I'm discouraged from spending time on it. Half the time I'm trying to figure out the code and moan to myself that, if I could write this function in C, I would have had it written in one-tenth the time... or less. Then, after I've written some working elisp code and look at, I see it's not that difficult. So how is it that it took so long to figure out? Maybe, if I live to be three hundred, I'll write an elisp book myself.





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