Comments on: A Modern Style of Programming

By: Jared

Jared — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:23:07 +0000

Hi Andy,

I’m not sure I think that will be an improvement. I don’t have much experience of Scheme but it seems that Emacs Lisp (and Common Lisp) are more practical languages, at least that is what Ray’s post linked above says to me.

By: Andy Wingo

Andy Wingo — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:40:26 +0000

Scheme will be in Emacs one day Hopefully even within a year or two!

By: Jared

Jared — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:35:35 +0000

@Ron – yes, it is extremely useful. And it is great for making new little tools. If only there was a good API reference it would be even better.

I often look at Practical Common Lisp to get an idea of the basic lisp constructs that are available. Many of them are available in emacs lisp too although perhaps dynamic scoping gives programming in emacs lisp a very different feel.

@Alexandr – Hi. I had a quick look at the modules you mention, thanks for pointing them out. I couldn’t see an obvious way of doing nested loop which is what generators / eager comprehensions make so nice. Eager comprehensions also don’t use a huge amount of memory so I guess they don’t construct a list first.

By: Alexandr Ciornii

Alexandr Ciornii — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:12:59 +0000

Interesting modules on CPAN for list generation: List::Maker, Attribute::Generator, List::MoreUtils.

By: Ron

Ron — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:34:07 +0000

Hear, hear, Ive found emacs to be incrediable tool for damm near everything major that I do, (techinical I browse the web from conkeror but thats emacs inspired). Ive started reading on the elisp docs that come with emacs and am quite enjoying how its teaching using actual emacs source code. Im quite glad you mentioned about the other lisp dialects being a good learning place to as both Scheme and Common lisp have certain attractions as well for different reasons thou

By: Jared

Jared — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:28:01 +0000

Hi Alex,

I like the posts with actual elisp code snippets too. But for some reason my waffley posts, which take much less time and effort to produce, are more popular, or at least read by more people Perhaps the audience for learning elisp is small.

Anyway, I found playing around with and reading about other lisp dialects (scheme/CL) helpful for learning emacs lisp. Although emacs lisp is much more useful of course!

And thanks for your comment. It’s good to know you liked the error handling post.

By: Alex Bennee

Alex Bennee — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:31:00 +0000

I’ve found elisp has a fairly steep learning curve. Some of this is
due to syntactic difference with most other languages I’m familiar
with. I could also do with more self contained bitesize examples that
demonstrate specific features of the language. While there is some
excellent documentation out there a lot of it is very dry reading
(especially if your not from a Computer Science background). Things
like the emacs wiki provide a good corpus of interesting code snippets
but I suspect most get plugged into .emacs by users with little
thought to what the code actually does, just if it works or not.

Part of the reason I joined the emacs planet blog network was to pick
up knowledge in small chunks and assimilate concepts and examples. You
last post on error handling was very interesting. Hopefully some of my
basic posts
will help someone else.

Basically I agree with you and welcome more language related posts on
the network