Re: Where is Emacs Lisp taught ?

["Garreau\, Alexandre" <galex-713@galex-713.eu>]

On 2018-10-26 at 11:05, Gene wrote:
> The missing Course is NOT one which emphasizes `functional' this or
> `lispiness' that ... it's one which keeps it's eyes upon the prize:
> "Exploiting the hell out of Emacs Lisp as a Domain-specific language
> which saves YOU time by allowing YOU to outsource and delegate
> time-consuming, tedious, otherwise-MANUAL operations!"
>
> Computer time is cheaper than dirt; YOUR TIME is priceless.

Indeed, that’s what I meant when I said that I/O and high-level user-end
facilities were what would make elisp a fantastic language for learning
programming, *nonetheless* (I said this only to moderate what I was
saying about how great would elisp be as a teaching language) the fact
it is not as good as it could as a general language (that statement
being made just because indeed, people find elisp great, so want to use
it as a general-purpose language, and then become disappointed as they
see it could be, but it’s difficult to make it so).

In studying, what’s important actually is not the speed of the language,
nor if it can run on a supercomputer or in space, nor even, if it’s easy
to read and write (unfortunately), but if students will find it useful:
so in the end, the libraries win.  And for now, python, for exactely
that reason, is winning.  While emacs libraries and interface to users,
their content, and their internet, is amazing and have even more amazing
potential (imagine if something such as Gnus could become a
user-friendly user-agent for people learning how to use a computer and
the internet, instead of DRM-ridden heavily-exploitable Mozilla
software).

That’d also give yet another good and practical reason to learn (hence
prefer) emacs to gedit (note most people I knew who discovered gedit and
difference between pure text and odt, became to use gedit instead of
libreoffice: imagine if they knew emacs), visualcode, eclipse or
code::blocks (or vim, but that’s yet another minority), bring more
users, more non-only-text-editing users, and quicker push emacs for even
better interfaces and improved security.