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My Emacs Lisp book is finished

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Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#41

Post by bloopernova »

jolux wrote: post #40
bloopernova wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just a devops person, not a coder by any stretch of the imagination, but I found that maintaining my .init.el in git helped me to learn enough elisp to be useful/dangerous. I really dig that it's a full on language used for the configuration files. It just makes so much sense to do it that way. (I also like VSCode's json prefs) Also I love sharing snippets of my .init.el: 40 │ ;; Taken from https://karl-voit.at/2…

system-type is actually a symbol, so you can do (eq system-type 'darwin) for the same effect. here's my macOS section: https://github.com/bklebe/.emacs.d/blob/b0ca255032d1240942ff...

Nice! I'll definitely take a close look at that.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#42

Post by draven »

ragnese wrote: post #38
jhbadger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much, yes. I'm sure there's a few things that have changed, and a newer book is welcome, but Emacs hasn't really changed much in 30 years.

I don't know my Emacs timeline very well, but I'd be nervous about lexical scope and the more recent cooperative async features of Emacs (lisp) not being represented in a 20 year old book. EDIT: Yeah, Emacs 24 had support for lexical scope, and that was in 2012. You'd be doing a disservice to yourself, IMO, to write dynamically scoped Elisp today, unless you had a specific reason. And if you don't even KNOW that lexi…

I checked the book's TOC and was surprised to see that lexical scoping was introduced in the last chapter.

https://github.com/alphapapa/emacs-package-dev-handbook#lexi... says using lexical scoping is a best practice.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#43

Post by xrd »

signa11 wrote: post #21

i have used "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" available here: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/writing-gnu-emacs/97814... from a long time past for elisp programming. mentioning it here in the hope that it is is useful to others as well...

I've still got my physical copy and will never get rid of it.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#44

Post by xrd »

I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly "Writing Emacs Extensions" book years ago. I just never got into the mode of using Elisp on a daily basis and it's faded from memory.

I'm excited about this book. And, I really wish there was a book that showed how a developer using a more modern language like JavaScript could use it to customize Emacs.

This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powerful way. When I install a new Emacs into a new debian machine, i still struggle to get package installation working. But I'm getting really worried about the direction Microsoft is taking with VSCode and wish I could be as productive in Emacs. Opening up that environment to modern developers who could tweak their own tools would be amazing and revolutionary.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#45

Post by ljm »

mrspeaker wrote: post #3

I think this book would be perfect for me - I have been using Emacs for quite a while, but never mastered elisp: I could never figure out how to structure things properly. Looking at the book landing page, I think I would have passed on it because the Table of Contents make it look a bit like the book is just covering specific tasks (about rearranging sentences) rather than general tasks, like using best practices fo…

I would love a dead tree version too. I've never managed to get on well with ebooks and PDFs.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#46

Post by grogenaut »

xrd wrote: post #44

I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly "Writing Emacs Extensions" book years ago. I just never got into the mode of using Elisp on a daily basis and it's faded from memory. I'm excited about this book. And, I really wish there was a book that showed how a developer using a more modern language like JavaScript could use it to customize Emacs. This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powe…

Try neovim to see what this approach might look like, yes it's vi not emacs, but they allow python and rust plugins and have a plugin framework now. It's killed sublime for me. And I used to use emacs over vi.

Personally I'd like emacs a lot more if it's plugins system just worked like vscodes does and as you said let me use languages I'm familiar with.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#47

Post by [deleted] »

bloopernova wrote: post #37
rvdginste wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer, I find it a bit embarassing that I started using Emacs in 2000, that at some point I even read my email with it, and that I never took the time to really learn emacs-lisp. Still, some day I will. This book might help me. :)

I'm just a devops person, not a coder by any stretch of the imagination, but I found that maintaining my .init.el in git helped me to learn enough elisp to be useful/dangerous. I really dig that it's a full on language used for the configuration files. It just makes so much sense to do it that way. (I also like VSCode's json prefs) Also I love sharing snippets of my .init.el: 40 │ ;; Taken from https://karl-voit.at/2…

[deleted]

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#48

Post by fayten »

grogenaut wrote: post #46
xrd wrote: post #44

I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly "Writing Emacs Extensions" book years ago. I just never got into the mode of using Elisp on a daily basis and it's faded from memory. I'm excited about this book. And, I really wish there was a book that showed how a developer using a more modern language like JavaScript could use it to customize Emacs. This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powe…

Try neovim to see what this approach might look like, yes it's vi not emacs, but they allow python and rust plugins and have a plugin framework now. It's killed sublime for me. And I used to use emacs over vi. Personally I'd like emacs a lot more if it's plugins system just worked like vscodes does and as you said let me use languages I'm familiar with.

Unfortunately it looks like it's a dead project, but https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-epc builds out an RPC framework for emacs. This would theoretically allow you to use any language you want. The repo shows node.js, python, and ruby integration.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#49

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

xrd wrote: post #44

I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly "Writing Emacs Extensions" book years ago. I just never got into the mode of using Elisp on a daily basis and it's faded from memory. I'm excited about this book. And, I really wish there was a book that showed how a developer using a more modern language like JavaScript could use it to customize Emacs. This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powe…

> This is why VSCode is winning, because it embraces modern languages in a really powerful way.

This notion that Javascript is superior to (e.g. elisp) because JS is new and elisp is "old" is really irritating. The reasons JS exists has absolutely zero to do with any issues with elisp or lisp or C or haskell or any other programming language. The fact that you know it and do not know elisp is a real thing, but it says nothing about the qualities and properties of either language.

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#50

Post by mindcrime »

Koshkin wrote: post #27
shidima wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you would elaborate on why you think that, you would not be down voted so much. Having said that, if you don't like it maybe you should find an editor that suits you more?

To be fair, the parent is not talking about the editor but rather its configuration language. Indeed, there have been attempts to replace elisp with other languages, such as Scheme (guile) and Common Lisp.

There is apparently a Guile enabled version of Emacs available.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsBuild

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