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The entire second chapter is devoted to learning emacs. I find this to be a baffling editing decision. "Thanks for reading this book, but before we cover what
by LargeWu 10y ago
The entire second chapter is devoted to learning emacs. I find this to be a baffling editing decision.
"Thanks for reading this book, but before we cover what you came for, let's do this other completely orthogonal thing first."
- chrisoakman 10y agoI totally agree the overhead of learning Emacs is orthogonal from learning Lisp. IMO, it's a shame that there is such a strong association between that tooling ecosystem and Lisp languages. I think it pushes a lot of newcomers away from the learning process. One of the design goals of Parinfer[1] is to help reduce the cognitive load of Lisp syntax for newcomers. Hopefully more introductory texts adopt it as part of their environment setup. [1]:https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/
- snowcrshd 10y agoWow, those docs are pretty good!
- ekzy 10y agoYou are free to skip the chapter and there is not a single reference to emacs in the rest of the book. I did it with another editor, I think the emacs chapter could be an annexe. It's only bonus and I can only be grateful as the book is free
- joeevans1000 10y agoI think Clojure is so much better with emacs, and teaching working tooling is the key to teaching a language. That's because actually doing the coding is the key to understanding the language. Emacs is by far the best editor out there for this language. One of the trickiest aspects to picking up emacs is the emacs init files, which the author provided. I just think it's awesome that he takes you from zero to a working development environment and doesn't leave getting code running as an exercise for the reader (which would mean many wouldn't get it running).