Re: learning Emacs Lisp

[Niels Giesen <niels.giesen@gmail.com>]

Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> writes:
[...]
> Of course. But eLisp is special in that its almost unreadable to the
> typical procedural programmer fluent in C/C++ etc until you know a lot
> if it already. Or that was my experience. And we all have different
> experiences so it does no harm to remain open as to what suits other
> people.

Where is there any evidence that the original OP is a `typical
procedural programmer fluent in C/C++'? 

It annoys me to pieces that so many textbooks assume that everyone out
there is a C/C++/Java programmer. For me, Lisp was my first
programming language (thanks to Emacs, which I started using to write
law papers in), and I do not need textbooks to explain for instance
Ruby to me in Lisp (which is perfectly feasible) but I even less need
comparisons with Java or C. Even worse, doing so is a major
distraction from the real object of learning. 

Consider teaching Dutch to someone from Morocco but using English
during the lessons: that's just plain silly and simply leads to
unnecessary confusion. Using analogies from Slovak to teach Polish
however may be insightful, but only when the student already has
knowledge of a Slavic language. Same goes with programming languages:
do not assume.

When teaching something, teach it by itself; people willing to learn a
new language are most likely not stupid, and if they are somewhat
smart, they will find out for themselves what differences and
similarities there are between languages known already.

For me, it would have been nice when learning JavaScript if the books
had warned me that not everything is an expression (invalid left-hand
assignment anyone?), that you have to explicitly return something,
that there are things such as keywords, and it would be nice if
textbooks explain how to take advantage of closures instead of trying
to get rid of them, hide them, and how to build an ugly half-assed
Class system.

The first few of those would cause people coming from C or Java at
least to frown but most probably to get irritated ("Why would I care
about all these strange incomprehensible things from some dead
language with too many parens, when all I want to do is simply to
learn JavaScript?????"). Therefore, I would not recommend such in a
learning text on JavaScript.

The second however, how to make good use of lexical scoping, is
interesting to learn, and should be explained by itself, as should be
prototype based inheritance and functions as first-class things (two
of which could - but should not - be explained by comparison with
Lisp).

Comparisons with Java-style OOP however should not be in a basic
textbook on learning JavaScript, and certainly no attempt should be
made to mimic it -- for the very same reasons that comparisons with
Lisp should not be made in a general textbook.