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Master Emacs in one year

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Re: Master Emacs in one year

#51

Post by fearandclothing »

mentos wrote: post #42

Can anyone share what they feel are their top 3 greatest workflow improvements in productivity going from a point and click IDE to a shortcut based IDE like emacs?

For me it's less about productivity and more about comfort. When I first started using Emacs I felt like it was a lot easier to move the cursor around and manipulate text with shortcuts consisting of keys that were already near where my hands were on the keyboard.

I use vim now though, and I find that the keybindings feel much more natural, being based on the positions of the keys rather than mnemonic-based ones in Emacs (e.g. ctrl-n for "next line").

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#52

Post by ExpiredLink »

mentos wrote: post #42

Can anyone share what they feel are their top 3 greatest workflow improvements in productivity going from a point and click IDE to a shortcut based IDE like emacs?

What's a "point and click IDE"? Eclipse and Visual Studio are "shortcut based". I've never seen a "point and click IDE" except maybe SQL Windows/Gupta/Centura.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#53

Post by awj »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #40
octopus wrote: post #37

A developer who is curious enough to try Lisp is possibly more intelligent than average This is the kind of exaggeration that makes a lot of people to avoid even trying Lisp. Any programming language that uses a different programming paradigm than the one you are familiar with will make you a better programmer.

I don't really have any desire to try lisp, and every time I see that kind of lisp advocacy I have even less.

If you do decide to try a lisp, don't start with Emacs Lisp. It's a mess. Go with Clojure, out of all lisps it's one of the least self-congratulatory about how awesome they all are for using lisp.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#55

Post by MarcScott »

scottlocklin wrote: post #54

A friend of mine asked me this recently: are there many young programmers investing in emacs? I only know a few... it's kind of depressing.

I'll be using emacs as the sole text editor with my students in September, so there'll be a few more young programmers learning how to use it.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#56

Post by thejdude »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #40
octopus wrote: post #37

A developer who is curious enough to try Lisp is possibly more intelligent than average This is the kind of exaggeration that makes a lot of people to avoid even trying Lisp. Any programming language that uses a different programming paradigm than the one you are familiar with will make you a better programmer.

I don't really have any desire to try lisp, and every time I see that kind of lisp advocacy I have even less.

Yes, it's very cheesy, but maybe rephrase it as "people who are open to trying new languages are more open-minded by definition, and they keep a flexible mind and learn to think about problems in different ways."

I mean, however cheesy some Smug Lisp Weenies(tm) may be, why not learn something new? Lisp (the language family) is really cool, you should try it. elisp may not be the most exciting family member, though.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#57

Post by tephra »

scottlocklin wrote: post #54

A friend of mine asked me this recently: are there many young programmers investing in emacs? I only know a few... it's kind of depressing.

23 year old third year computer science student. I only know of two students (me included) that are emacs users.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#58

Post by thejdude »

awj wrote: post #53
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really have any desire to try lisp, and every time I see that kind of lisp advocacy I have even less.

If you do decide to try a lisp, don't start with Emacs Lisp. It's a mess. Go with Clojure, out of all lisps it's one of the least self-congratulatory about how awesome they all are for using lisp.

Well, Clojure also was a mess when I tried it (2 years ago maybe?). Leiningen (a/the build system) was pretty slow, and I couldn't find a way to use the language in a more lisp-like way easily, like editing a few files and (re)loading them into a running REPL (other than iterating through all buffers in Emacs and loading/evaluating them manually; there may have been other problems as well, I don't remember). You know, like you can edit a few Java files in Eclipse, press shift-ctrl-s, and have the new code hot-deployed into your debugging session.

Maybe the people who wrote the Clojure tutorials considered that question to be SO natural they didn't even mention it, but I found it very unintuitive. And running a very slow tool on every code change and waiting for the build and then starting the program is very unnatural and un-lisp-like.

Common Lisp is a bit old by now, but it's always been very stable and fast. Maybe Racket is a more modern+mature Lisp family member that's nice to try.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#59

Post by gknoy »

awj wrote: post #53
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really have any desire to try lisp, and every time I see that kind of lisp advocacy I have even less.

If you do decide to try a lisp, don't start with Emacs Lisp. It's a mess. Go with Clojure, out of all lisps it's one of the least self-congratulatory about how awesome they all are for using lisp.

I'd also say that one might do well to explore it, even if you don't plan to use it for everything. I'm definitely a Lisp neophyte (Scheme in college, no Common lisp, and then ~6 years with some lisp-like proprietary framework), but there are some things I really miss from it.

As some have said, it's worth learning because of the way it can change the way you think about things. It sounds hokey and trite, or like someone's trying to be smug ("I'm in the secret lisp club!"), but I genuinely feel profoundly grateful to have been exposed to Lisp. (To be fair, I also really like programming in Python for _many_ of the same reasons I enjoyed programming in Lisp.)

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#60

Post by thejdude »

collyw wrote: post #35
tokenrove wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nevermind why I should consider taking a year (an eternity in technological time) to master it. I don't want to proselytise, but maybe that hints at one of the core appeals of emacs. A year is nothing in terms of the span of time emacs has been around, and so time invested in making emacs your editor is effort that won't be discarded in the next technological cycle. The other aspect is what I mean by "making emacs…

Visual Studio, or Eclipse have been around for a fair while as well now. Its not like they will disappear with the next text cycle. And you can get productive with them in far less than a year.

I think you can also be quite productive in Emacs in a much shorter time.

The difference is: the flexibility of IDEs stops after a while, and then there's nothing new to learn to become more efficient. With Emacs, you can keep on learning and optimizing your work environment.

Disclaimer: I work with Eclipse almost exclusively these days, also because for Java it's so much better, IMHO.

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