Re: update intro to Emacs Lisp programming

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2018-05-23, at 16:38, John Wiegley <johnw@gnu.org> wrote:

>>>>>> "MB" == Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:
>
>>> > BTW, I once had an idea to write a "next step" book on Emacs Lisp, one >
>>> that could be read after the Intro.
>>>
>>> How about adding that mew material as the start of the Emacs Lisp Reference
>>> Manual?
>
> MB> There are several reasons I don't think this is a good idea.
>
> I have a reason why I disagree with this comment.
>
> ;)

Understood. ;-)

So, here are my reasons, in no particular order.

- style: The Lisp Reference is more in formal/impersonal style, Eintro
  is much more casual.  So is my writing.  (You can visit my blog at
  mbork.pl to see a sample.)  It won't fit to the Reference.

- ambition: I'd like to have "my" book on Elisp.  It's not only about
  vanity, though - I would like to author more books on various stuff in
  the future, and I'd like this to be part of my track record.  (Note:
  it is not going to be my first book, I coauthored a well-received
  textbook on LaTeX (in Polish) and wrote a textbook about certain part
  of mathematics (https://zbmath.org/?q=an:1362.54001), and I'm in the
  process of writing yet another one.)

- money: I'd like to get some funding for the book.  (I thought about
  crowdfunding it.)  I don't want to become a millionaire thanks to it,
  but it will require considerable time from me, and I am now the sole
  financial supporter of my family, so I have to be quite careful wrt
  where I put my time in.  (In an ideal world, I'd like to have, say
  $8000 to cover all expenses of copyediting, proof-reading, printing
  etc. and my time; in the real world, I think $2000 is a reasonable
  minimum, which would mean this to be, say, a half-charity project.)

  (Note: I am aware that this technically might not exclude rms' idea.)

- policy: While I do appreciate some of rms' and FSF's ideals, I don't
  feel like I can identify with FSF's goals/policies to the extent of
  authoring a big thing with them (as opposed to minor things like bug
  fixes and small Emacs features).

- license: I explicitly do *not* want to release it under GFDL.  One
  possibility would be to have a small print-run of physical copies
  (say, a few hundred at most) and a digital version (pdf and maybe epub
  etc.) which would be sold, but also freely available (e.g. after some
  short time, like a few months).  While nothing is set in stone
  (although I'd really want to have at least some physical copies),
  I consider GFDL a very bad idea in case of (at least partially)
  creative writing (as opposed to purely technical writing, like
  a reference guide).  I thought about e.g. CC-BY-ND, which explicitly
  forbids distributing modified copies.

Does that make more sense?

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl