Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:

> "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> writes:
>>> Now if the cursor-keys didn't work it would not be so bad
>>> And ideal would be for them to work AND be documented
>>> But works and NOT documented/demoed in tutorial... and there are serious 
>>> allegations of ATTITUDE!
>>
>> I can't believe it.  Do you teach retards?
>
>
> I teach intelligent, interested and engaged students, whom it is my
> pleasure and privilege to introduce to programming, and show them how to
> take charge of their own computers, and have the computers work for
> them, rather than the other way around. I am sure that Rusi is in the
> same position.
>
> Over time, the experiences of people change, and the knowledge that they
> bring with them changes. This makes some things harder to understand,
> some things easier. For instance, I have the majority of my students got
> to grips with git in a day or two (which I was not expecting),
> something which has caused grief here. But running "hello world" in
> python in Emacs not easy. "Eval buffer" -- what's that then? And even
> once you've done that, where has it gone, because the shell isn't
> visible.


Be careful, soon they'll complain when you make them use a keyboard
instead of an iPad to write code…


These days, I'm starting to think that there's a deficit of CS history
teaching.

When I started programming, modern computing was only 25 years old, so
CS history was short, and even if not widely accessible outside of
academia, it was rather easy to cover it all.

While arguably nothing much has been invented since the end of the
sixties, it appears that google doesn't give easy access to the history,
giving some preference to new web sites and recent entries.  And one
must also consider that older papers and books are either not accessible
or only accessible in the deep web or behind paywalls.

Therefore it seems to me that teaching CS history would help students
widden their horizons, given the diversity of languages and OSes
already invented.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk