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: Fri, 26 Oct 2018 13:43:03 +0200 Message-ID: <87mur19bnc.fsf@portable.galex-713.eu> References: <5B8BFDC9-A07B-48FE-8C97-1BB0B84E5577@gmail.com> <865zxruycx.fsf@zoho.com> <875zxr7zke.fsf@portable.galex-713.eu> <868t2lsvdm.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 1540554104 28626 195.159.176.226 (26 Oct 2018 11:41:44 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@blaine.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2018 11:41:44 +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 Fri Oct 26 13:41:40 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 1gG0Um-0007NV-Mz for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Fri, 26 Oct 2018 13:41:40 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:59593 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gG0Wt-0006Z2-8s for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Fri, 26 Oct 2018 07:43:51 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:41587) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gG0WN-0006Yv-Hm for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Fri, 26 Oct 2018 07:43:20 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gG0WM-0008Au-Gm for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Fri, 26 Oct 2018 07:43:19 -0400 Original-Received: from portable.galex-713.eu ([2a00:5884:8305::1]:54868) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gG0WM-00089r-9E for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Fri, 26 Oct 2018 07:43:18 -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 1gG0WK-0004JP-ET for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Fri, 26 Oct 2018 13:43:16 +0200 PGP-FINGERPRINT: E109 9988 4197 D7CB B0BC 5C23 8DEB 24BA 867D 3F7F Accept-Language: fr, en, eo, it, br In-Reply-To: <868t2lsvdm.fsf@zoho.com> (Emanuel Berg's message of "Thu, 25 Oct 2018 21:01:57 +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:118416 Archived-At: On 2018-10-25 at 21:01, Emanuel Berg wrote: > Garreau, Alexandre wrote: >> Elisp is often to be considered a bad language > > By whom? Elisp is not considered a bad language. It is just another > Lisp dialect. I wouldn't recommend it for an industrial style project > - Common Lisp, rather - but for Emacs purposes it is great and not > that different at all from many other Lisps that are around. By some people on EmacsWiki at least: What I=E2=80=99ve heard personally is about inconsistency in the language a= s a library/interface, and slowness due to naive implementation of lisp, absence of compiler, commitment to a truely maximally dynamic architecture, and simplicity (you can=E2=80=99t extend the reader for insta= nce, contrarily to both cl and TeX). Beside that (therefore including emacs-specific features), Emacs Lisp is partially compatible with Common Lisp and I=E2=80=99ve already heard of applications working almost completely out-of-the-box with no modification by being evaluated by both Emacs and a Common Lisp compiler/interpreter. It is, I believe, in expressivity, still a better language than most languages, such as javascript, C, or in speed too (as well as expressivity), probably better than python, and =E2=80=9Csome old very bad compilers=E2=80=9D I heard (how much compared to java? might be impressive). But compared to quite unknown languages better known to lispers than to the average programer, such as FP (maybe APL?), Scheme, CL, Haskell, it certainly lacks stuff. > And a note on university education. There aren't really courses on > specific languages anymore, if there ever was (?). The courses have > names that denotes different themes or aspects of computers/computing, > and then you do stuff with tools and languages to fit the purpose. I often feel that=E2=80=99s more an excuse to invisibilize vendor lock-in (= even when only caused by, at least, habits and interfaces), because in the end you have to spend time with a language, you have your preferences, and these change a lot the kind of errors students will do. So your course *will* in the end be tailored by a language, except if it=E2=80=99s purely theoric, and then it=E2=80=99s bad because harder to grasp, or accep= ting arbitrary languages from students, which then can demand an awful quantity of work to correct if only one student have an unusual and unknown language. For instance, I have a =E2=80=9Cfunctional programming=E2=80=9D course, whi= ch is in ocaml, like almost everywhere I saw in France, because =E2=80=9Cthey don=E2= =80=99t know ocaml=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Cdislike lisp because too much parentheses=E2=80= =9D. And in it at some point we did 80% of imperative programming, because the Graphics Ocaml API is purely imperative, so I ended rewriting the whole API in functional style so to try benefiting purely functional programming. So in the end it=E2=80=99s not a real =E2=80=9Cfunctional programming=E2=80= =9D course, it is a fake name, the real object of the course is =E2=80=9Cocaml programming=E2= =80=9D. > So even if you don't find the word "Lisp" anywhere doesn't mean it > isn't taught anywhere/-longer. There is hope :) Of course, but even looking at the courses *content* lisp is not that popular, compared to C and python=E2=80=A6 or C++=E2=80=A6 or Java =E2=80= =A6or even javascript and php separately maybe (taught united they certainly win).