Re: Emacs Customization - newbie's question

[Tim X <timx@spamto.devnul.com>]

"Daniel R. Anderson" <dan@mathjunkies.com> writes:

> <snip>
> > > 1)  Every book ever written about technology is outdated before it gets
> > > off the press
> > 
> > True but this book is fairly outdated as it uses Emacs 19 which is two 
> > major versions behind the curve.
> </snip>
> 
> Have you seen the book?  What is it that would go outdated?  Are you
> trying to tell me C-x C-f doesn't open files anymore?  Or that when I
> press C-v I don't just down the buffer a screen?  Run over the
> changelogs.  You´ll see that there is not a whole lot that has changed
> for the beginning user.
> 
> Grab a book on C written 10 years ago and you won´t see radical syntax
> changes.  Programs might be optimized for hardware which today can be
> gotten for free, but you could probably type in examples (so long as
> they use standard libraries) into a modern compiler and they would work.
> 
Sorry, but I don't agree with this. Quite a lot has changed between
emacs 19 and emacs 21. Apart from user visible changes such as the way
font locking has evolved, there has been considerable change in the
internals of emacs which in turn leads to different ways of doing
things. Look at the number of packages which have/are being re-written
to utilize new features or ways of doing things. 

While none of these seem too difficult to anyone who is familiar with
emacs, if you are learning and the book you are learning from is out
of date, your 

    1. likely to get very frustrated when things won't work the way
       they are said to work in the book
    2. learn bad habits or less optimal solutions which may have been
       appropriate in the old version, but are not any longer.

Your analagy with C is IMO poor as well - C is a well defined
programming language which has had only minimal change over the last
30 years. Emacs is a whole working environment which has evolved
significantly over the last few versions - the move from 20 to 21 was
a major move and from memory one which was not achieved without some
hot debate because of the extensions and internal changes it involved.

Tim


-- 
Tim Cross
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