On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 10:08:12PM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Programming editor commands has the additional advantage that a program need
> > not be very large to be tangibly useful in editing. A first project can be
> > very simple. One can thus slide very smoothly from using the editor to edit
> > into learning to program with it.
> 
> Of course, after 30 years of development, most of the things a beginner
> will want has already been coded up, so the beginner's reaction nowadays
> is to look for a package which provides the thing he's longing for.

A beginner nowadays will scream "Eeek! Text! What is this?" (yeah, very
much tongue in cheek ;-P

Actually, I (as an oldtimer) have the pleasure to meet a very diverse
bunch of "beginners", some of which really enjoy poking at things the
same way it has ever been. For those, Emacs is always a temptation...

One of the biggest assets of Emacs is that you not only can hack at
it, but that it tells you the way (the Lisp machine heritage, I suppose).

> Missing this opportunity to learn to hack along the way.

Hm. As of late (perhaps it's the beginning of dementia?) I rather have
the impression that things haven't changed that much. Of course, being
a "professional programmer" has become way more boring, nowadays you
just stick components together without knowing too much about how they
work [1]. But hacker mentality somehow survives, it's just that the
percentage of hackers needed in the field of software munging (I don't
dare call it "engineering", yet) is shrinking, as it is to be expected
in a maturing field. At least, in our current social context.

Phew :-)

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335
   (I can't find the original reference, but the discussion there
   might give you an idea)

Cheers
-- tomás