41–43 of 43 posts
What would be a good resource to learn Lisp in terms of problem solving or doing projects? I feel I only learn something when I use it to solve a problem in the real world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? That's such a weird dichotomy to present, what feature of Vim did other text editors lack that VS Code managed to replace? Vim is a "relevant skill" because it is a better editing paradigm. VS Code is no more competition to it than Nano or Emacs were.
Disclaimer: I'm a long-time Vim user who can't stand editing text without the modal editing paradigm anymore. Emacs is a competition to Vim, because it has a couple things that Vim does not have: 1. It can understand that a certain part of a file is written in one language and another in another language; and then give you appropriate syntax highlighting, indentation etc. in these specific parts. Vim can't do that. 2…
Sure it can! Here[1]'s an example of someone using it for html embedded in heredocs.
> [Emacs'] scripting language is a lot nicer to work with.
This is not a fundamental limitation. E.G. neovim uses lua. (I'm not counting python and lua embedded in vim, because afaik they're a total pain to work with.)
I actually recently started transitioning from vim to emacs recently, but I don't think any of your arguments in favour of it are particularly strong. I do, however, agree that vim and emacs are at the cutting-edge of text editing, possibly along with some more niche editors like vis, sam, and kakoune.
1: https://forum.dlang.org/post/bvznmyneecpwgrxmgnby@forum.dlan...
Two questions: With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have? Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?
One of the great advantages of these "old-school" text editors is the extent to which they can be customized. This is even more true about Emacs, which is mainly written in its own "scripting" language. Almost everything on Emacs is exposed to the user during runtime. It's very easy to make both temporary and permanent changes. Emacs is self-documenting: there are handy commands to find keybindings, variables, and functions definitions. If this is not good enough, you can go straight to the source code and redefine whatever you want. You just need to evaluate the code for it to become available at runtime: no reboot necessary. Once you get used to this level of freedom, it's hard to get used to other platforms.
One thing I'd like to point out is that, even though Vim and Emacs are old, this doesn't mean they're stuck in time. They are constantly updated to support all the current technologies that people might associate with newer text editors like Atom and VS Code.