From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Garreau\, Alexandre" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Where is Emacs Lisp taught ? Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2018 00:24:49 +0200 Message-ID: <875zxr7zke.fsf@portable.galex-713.eu> References: <5B8BFDC9-A07B-48FE-8C97-1BB0B84E5577@gmail.com> <865zxruycx.fsf@zoho.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: blaine.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: blaine.gmane.org 1540419801 28406 195.159.176.226 (24 Oct 2018 22:23:21 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@blaine.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2018 22:23:21 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Gnus (5.13), GNU Emacs 25.1.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.22.11) of 2017-09-15, modified by Debian To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu Oct 25 00:23:17 2018 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.84_2) (envelope-from ) id 1gFRYY-0007F7-4o for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Thu, 25 Oct 2018 00:23:14 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:50698 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gFRae-0008Re-DB for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:25:24 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:55172) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gFRa9-0008QL-M5 for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:24:54 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gFRa8-0007WT-PE for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:24:53 -0400 Original-Received: from portable.galex-713.eu ([2a00:5884:8305::1]:46376) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gFRa8-0007V7-Hb for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:24:52 -0400 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1] helo=portable.galex-713.eu) by portable.galex-713.eu with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.89) (envelope-from ) id 1gFRa5-000862-VF for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Thu, 25 Oct 2018 00:24:50 +0200 PGP-FINGERPRINT: E109 9988 4197 D7CB B0BC 5C23 8DEB 24BA 867D 3F7F Accept-Language: fr, en, eo, it, br In-Reply-To: <865zxruycx.fsf@zoho.com> (Emanuel Berg's message of "Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:02:22 +0200") X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: Genre and OS details not recognized. X-Received-From: 2a00:5884:8305::1 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.21 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" Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:118395 Archived-At: On 2018-10-24 at 18:02, Emanuel Berg wrote: > Jean-Christophe Helary wrote: > >> I'm trying to gather information about Emacs >> Lisp and specifically about where it is taught >> (bootcamps/universities, etc.) >> >> Has anybody information on that? > > I don't think that Emacs Lisp in particular is > thought anywhere, but Lisp is thought at > universities around the world, sometimes as > part of courses in "functional programming", > where other languages might be included as > well, e.g. Haskell and Erlang (perhaps > sometimes SML). Until then I heard they teached scheme from college 2nd year in the capital of the region (racket I guess, unless it=E2=80=99s mit-scheme), and everywhere else afaik it=E2=80=99s OCaml in France (maybe nationalism?). > And I think it is better to teach CL than Elisp, in all honesty... I am not sure. Elisp is often to be considered a bad language, but it has the somewhat rare and paradoxal double advantage (peculiar to lisp, but more extreme here) of both having a simple and naive implementation, and yet being quite high level and extremely close to I/O. It also is quite much used (I bet its usage proportion is comparable to CL and scheme united). Those are obvious advantages when learning programming, and are main reasons why so far I saw stupidities such as using javascript, (damn) VisualBasic, or python, taught to students for learning programming: easy GUI, very imperative style, ability to do more or less functional stuff. But in reality, what is important is not GUI, but easy access to I/O (so to easily develop concrete software that will solve concrete problems so to better discover how programming is useful), and usage potential: elisp, unlike scheme so far, has many interesting and powerful libraries for interacting with the internet, files, keyboard, screen, and these are extremely easy to use, compared to SDL C programming, VB GUI programming, GTK interface usage, or even shellscripts sometimes. I believe, especially in first year, what is important is give to students what will make them want to pursue their studies, and, if they fail or stop them, to keep programming stuff. So they need an environment regularly giving them interesting practical problems, and making them easy to solve. In this respect, unless using some bad language such as python or javascript, differently bad languages such as elisp and bash are going to be way more useful and simple to learn and not to forgot. I=E2=80=99d like to see some course introduce =E2=80=9Cemacs macros=E2=80= =9D, then some lisp config, then progressively teach people how to program without them even knowing it, like I saw it happened to some people before (like first Gosling Emacs user, beside Gosling himself, iirc). It would be cool. We need more programming literacy in general population.