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

[rusi]

On Jun 26, 8:03 am, ken <geb...@mousecar.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hi Ken
It would be great if you could explicate a little how/where/why you
get stuck.
Me? I am probably in a similar situation to you but I guess for
complementary reasons:
Lisp as a language and paradigm are fine and the docs are (usually)
better than average but I usually get hit by 40 years of crud, eg:
- how many different keybinding syntaxes are there?
- how many variations on assignment: setq, setq-default, defvar,
customize etc

And then if you go up the pyramid from elisp code to emacs use it only
gets worse: how many mailing systems are there?