From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: rusi Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: becoming a developer [was: Re: Issues with emacs] Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 20:23:36 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <0b78ca92-9bbf-44fe-a9ba-bbca8f5fb4e0@y3g2000pbc.googlegroups.com> References: <87bokbb4zw.fsf@gnu.org> <4FE67DF4.1010903@mousecar.com> <8262af46dv.fsf@gmail.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1340682134 2750 80.91.229.3 (26 Jun 2012 03:42:14 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 03:42:14 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Jun 26 05:42:14 2012 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1SjMfK-0000XZ-Qw for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 26 Jun 2012 05:42:11 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:41289 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1SjMOu-0003Yl-MA for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:25:12 -0400 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!y3g2000pbc.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 50 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 116.74.129.195 Original-X-Trace: posting.google.com 1340681016 19136 127.0.0.1 (26 Jun 2012 03:23:36 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 03:23:36 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: y3g2000pbc.googlegroups.com; posting-host=116.74.129.195; posting-account=mBpa7woAAAAGLEWUUKpmbxm-Quu5D8ui User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1,gzip(gfe) Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:193079 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:85474 Archived-At: On Jun 26, 8:03=A0am, ken wrote: > On 06/25/2012 02:02 PM Sivaram Neelakantan wrote: > > > On Sun, Jun 24 2012,ken =A0wrote: > > > [snipped 37 lines] > > >> 5. Make the elisp documentation and tutorials so easy and fun to learn > >> that tons of people actually want to write code. > > > That'll be the day! :-) > > > =A0 sivaram > > Sivaram, > > People familiar with C say it's a difficult language. =A0But I guess they > never tried it. =A0You can pick up a book on it and if you give it a > little bit of time every day, you can learn enough in a week to write > interesting and working programs. =A0And it's fun. =A0Shell programming l= ike > bash and ksh are easy and fun too. =A0C++ too, but to a lesser degree. > But elisp.... =A0I tried repeatedly over more than ten years to learn it, > bought and read a couple books on it, did some tutorials, of course > spent a lot of time in the docs, but it wasn't until just a few years > ago (and with a lot of help from this list) that I was able to write my > first elisp program. =A0I started a second one last year and I'm still > plodding really slow through it (but not often). =A0It takes so long to > get things to work that I'm discouraged from spending time on it. =A0Half > the time I'm trying to figure out the code and moan to myself that, if I > could write this function in C, I would have had it written in one-tenth > the time... or less. =A0Then, after I've written some working elisp code > and look at, I see it's not that difficult. =A0So how is it that it took > so long to figure out? =A0Maybe, if I live to be three hundred, I'll writ= e > an elisp book myself. Hi Ken It would be great if you could explicate a little how/where/why you get stuck. Me? I am probably in a similar situation to you but I guess for complementary reasons: Lisp as a language and paradigm are fine and the docs are (usually) better than average but I usually get hit by 40 years of crud, eg: - how many different keybinding syntaxes are there? - how many variations on assignment: setq, setq-default, defvar, customize etc And then if you go up the pyramid from elisp code to emacs use it only gets worse: how many mailing systems are there?