Re: Improve the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual with intro sections

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > Also, one of the things that I think is missing from the
  > Introduction is exercises.

I agree this would be a good addition, once we make it correct for
today's Emacs.

One of the reasons it bends over backwards to explain to people
who know absolutely nothing about programming is that
the experience with Multics Emacs (written in Maclisp) around
1980 was that the secretaries that used it learned to write
editing commands with a similar manual.  People were very surprised
by this.

That manual didn't even say it was to teach programming.
It was about "making your own editing commands" or some such thing.
Peoplle speculated that the secretaries would not have tried
if they though it was "programming" because they believed that
programming was very hard and mere secretaries couldn't learn it.
But when they didn't know it was "programming", they tried it
and succeeded.

We don't go to the point of covering up that the topic is programming.
But we want people who think programming is far beyond them
to be able to learn frm this book.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.