Re: Where is Emacs Lisp taught ?

[Gene <gene.sullivan@gmail.com>]

On Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 8:20:06 PM UTC-4, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:

> On 2018-10-26 at 11:05, Gene wrote:

>> The missing Course is NOT one which emphasizes `functional' this or
>> `lispiness' that ... it's one which keeps it's eyes upon the prize:

>> `Exploiting the hell out of Emacs Lisp as a Domain-specific language
>> which saves YOU time by allowing YOU to outsource and delegate
>> time-consuming, tedious, otherwise-MANUAL operations!'
>>
>> Computer time is cheaper than dirt; YOUR TIME is priceless.

 
> Indeed, that’s what I meant when I said that I/O and high-level user-end
> facilities were what would make elisp a fantastic language for learning
> programming, ...

Not only elisp as a would-be stand-alone language, but emacs as the dynamic engine providing the elisp REPL and the workshop-full-of-tools environment it provides.


To wit, folks are doing reproducible research via org-mode's code blocks ... although usually via a single language.

ref: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=youtube+reproducable+research+with+emacs

Can you imagine a self-paced, self-directed learner working his or her way through a programming problem hosted on Rosetta Code?

ref: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Emacs_Lisp

There are so many languages supported by code block feature of Org-mode that the student can perform their very own n-way comparative linguistics research.


> ... *nonetheless* (I said this only to moderate what I was
> saying about how great would elisp be as a teaching language)

It could be, if one started from a Natural Language Processing perspective.
I'd like to see someone start with the Noun-Phrase and Verb-Phrase `lists' from a Linguistic Typology perspective using two-or-more families of languages ... say Germanic languages (including English) and Romance languages.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology

If lisp can encode `trees' then why not sentence structure trees?

ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sentence+structure+trees&t=ffsb&ia=web


All too often the teaching of `programming languages' requires that the servile, obsequious, fawning `student' emphasizes syntax over semantics as he or she forfeits self-directed self-pacing while subordinating his or her curiosity to FEAR ... fear of a `bad grade', fear of not COMPLETING an `assignment' vis-a-vis some arbitrary and capricious `dead line', fear of losing position in class standing, etc.

It might be interesting to see a semantics-first approach to LEARNING computer languages from this sort of more_Natural-Language-Semantic_THAN_CS-syntactic approach.

I'm all for displacing didactics with mathetics.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathetics

Cheers!
  
I'd certainly like to see Rosetta Code's assortment of coding examples re-presented via one-example-per-Org-mode_file via the exploitation of code blocks.

ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=org-mode+code+blocks&t=ffsb&ia=web