The early posts on this blog are about experimentation with non-mainstream technologies, eventually settling on scheme.
Now, the main focus is on extending emacs i.e. writing emacs-lisp.
Why do I blog about emacs? There are a few reasons but basically it boils down to good old-fashioned self interest.
- In the past, I’ve found out how to do something cool and then forgotten about it. If I record all those cool things here then I won’t have that problem again in the future.
- Sometimes other emacsers come by and leave comments on my blog that point out an emacs feature or extension that I wouldn’t otherwise have known about.
and possibly the most important reason.
- For many years I was a fan of vim and in fact I still use it most days. However, I now do most of my text editing with emacs as I’ve found it to be superior in most ways. I’m hoping to convert other vimmers (and alternative advanced editor users) into emacsers. Why? Because, much like a programming language, an extensible text editor becomes more useful as the community becomes larger.
And what about guys who use notepad? Well, they are not really my target audience. If your needs are so little the notepad is good for you, then emacs is probably not the tool for you.
hello Ian,
i’ve just began studying computer science this year..My univerisity uses to initialise programming languages by C and Scheme.
Well, for C i think it needs much practicing,but for scheme it was different …i think its much easier than C, but it still obivious for me because im kinda embarraced in choosing the kind of exercice or problems to work on..
So please can help me in finding a suitable way to learn scheme?
Sincerely
Salma
Hi Salma,
I’m more of an emacser than a schemer although I have dabbled with both. The best resource I found for studying functional programming in general (and it does specifically use scheme) is How To Design Programs. It starts off with very basic stuff but in the end it pretty much covers everything. I think if you do the exercises you can get up to speed with scheme pretty quickly.
Javed