The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Fri, 05 Jan 2007

Another Stevey Blog Rant About Emacs

Here. It's quite long and complicated. I wish I had time to write that much stuff about Emacs. Anyway, some choice quotes about whether you should learn Emacs Lisp:

"First, recognize that Emacs Lisp isn't going anywhere. Emacs is not going to magically become programmable in Python or Ruby or JavaScript or Perl overnight ... [Emacs Lisp] will never be obsolete knowledge. You might as well start learning it now, and reap the benefits now."

On Lisp syntax:

"If you do it enough, eventually you'll enjoy programming in Emacs-Lisp, no matter how much you hate it initially ... you'll initially dislike Emacs-Lisp's syntax; it's virtually guaranteed. Fortunately, it doesn't really have much in the way of syntax; almost everything follows the exact same s-expression form. So you should get past the syntax pretty quickly, and in a few weeks you'll start liking it just fine.

I've done some bits and pieces of Emacs Lisp programming over the years and it is quite seductive, for lack of a better word. I think that's the nature of functional programming though once you really get in to it.