Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?"

[Rustom Mody]

On Thursday, August 1, 2013 8:09:08 PM UTC+5:30, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> 
> Yes, a struct is just a memory pattern. You are saying, a Lisp
> list isn't - is it moving around in memory, is it fragmented, or
> is allocation made dynamically based on the elements? Is that the
> difference? With pointers, isn't that what you get in C?  Please
> explain.

Well... I dont know if this is the best forum for these discussions :-)

In short: A language becomes more powerful when it has less...

Think of registers and interrupts disappearing from assembly to C, making C 
better than assembly in 95% use-cases.  Now if you were an assembly programmer, 
you would pooh-pooh a C (like) language: "How can having less make it a better 
language?"

It makes it better because one's thoughts have more clarity.

You may remember the quote from Bruce Lee: I am not afraid of the man who knows 
10 thousand kicks. I am afraid of the man who has practiced one kick 10 
thousand times.  Likewise in programming, doing few things well gets you 
further than doing many things sub-optimally.

And so assignment disappearing from C to haskell makes haskell programmers able 
to have better thoughts [Well they say 100% of the time; I say 80% of the time 
;-)  ]

I could go on eg why lisp can be C-like or haskell-like depending on how you 
use it etc etc.  Or answering 

> Are you saying: C doesn't have hash tables, search trees, etc.,
> you have to make them yourself with data types and pointers, and
> put them into structs, and then have the algorithm traverse them,
> and all this you do manually, with no support from the language?

However as I said this is getting too too OT for this group.

If you want we can continue off-list.
Do read my blog though http://blog.languager.org/  in case you find may my 
ideas painful to your delicate digestion :-)