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I did. After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to

I did. After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to write my thesis in electrical engineering. The tool was parsing my matlab files and generated latex, which i then made into the final pdf, complete with formulaes and calculations. So instead of writing a decent thesis, i learned about makefiles, latex, emacs lisp and the fact that parsers are very interesting. Also, Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp. Surely, i did not work a single day as an electric engineer. PS I keep looking for this book to this very day

jr_isidore 4mo ago
GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. In other words, it does a neophyte no good to see the matrix without having lived in it first. It's all one can manage learning emacs's editing primitives if you've never seen it before. Reminding them some (but not all!) of these primitives are in fact elisp expressions is just annoying.
- iLemming 4mo ago
  I have not forgotten my own "beginner's journey" - au contraire - I vividly remember it, and thus I'm sharing an admonition - so people wouldn't waste their time. Because I did. Besides, I have successfully mentored people from zero-to-hero and helped them learn Emacs. My suggestion to focus on Elisp is not like tech-splaining monads, and Lisp is not that difficult. Definitely not even in the same league of difficulty as Haskell. It is an astoundingly simple language. And yet people just ignore it for years, clueless of what they're missing.
  - vkazanov 4mo ago
    How did you approach emacs onboarding? In my case it wad sheer enthusiasm of 20 year old who want to do cool things, no matter the amount of effort. So if it takes learning a language, language it was. But i gave up on teaching Emacs. My current stance is: if you want emacs then you know how to do it.
    - iLemming 4mo ago
      > How did you approach emacs onboarding I'd typically would start by showcasing a single (albeit enormously important) aspect of it, like search. When someone sees the countless ways to search for things in Emacs: - isearch, query-replace, occur, multi-occur, project-search, find-file (with wildcards), ffap, apropos, xref-find-definitions/find-references, consult-line, consult-ripgrep, consult-fd, consult-hn, consult-omni, browser-hist-search, magit-find-file, magit-dired-log, etc. That typically, already is enough for them to say - "darn, I want this...". Then next step is to show them that there's nothing to fear - everything is documented, described and can be inspected on the go. In teams where pair-programming is a normal practice, I would typically watch their efforts with something in VSCode, IntelliJ, or even Vim and ask them if they'd want to see how I'd do the same/similar thing in Emacs. If the person is not interested, I won't push for it, but at that point, someone who worked with me on the same team knows that I can show them something entertaining and interesting to see, even if they don't get the immediate urge to dive into it.

jr_isidore 4mo ago

GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. In other words, it does a neophyte no good to see the matrix without having lived in it first. It's all one can manage learning emacs's editing primitives if you've never seen it before. Reminding them some (but not all!) of these primitives are in fact elisp expressions is just annoying.

iLemming 4mo ago
I have not forgotten my own "beginner's journey" - au contraire - I vividly remember it, and thus I'm sharing an admonition - so people wouldn't waste their time. Because I did. Besides, I have successfully mentored people from zero-to-hero and helped them learn Emacs. My suggestion to focus on Elisp is not like tech-splaining monads, and Lisp is not that difficult. Definitely not even in the same league of difficulty as Haskell. It is an astoundingly simple language. And yet people just ignore it for years, clueless of what they're missing.
- vkazanov 4mo ago
  How did you approach emacs onboarding? In my case it wad sheer enthusiasm of 20 year old who want to do cool things, no matter the amount of effort. So if it takes learning a language, language it was. But i gave up on teaching Emacs. My current stance is: if you want emacs then you know how to do it.
  - iLemming 4mo ago
    > How did you approach emacs onboarding I'd typically would start by showcasing a single (albeit enormously important) aspect of it, like search. When someone sees the countless ways to search for things in Emacs: - isearch, query-replace, occur, multi-occur, project-search, find-file (with wildcards), ffap, apropos, xref-find-definitions/find-references, consult-line, consult-ripgrep, consult-fd, consult-hn, consult-omni, browser-hist-search, magit-find-file, magit-dired-log, etc. That typically, already is enough for them to say - "darn, I want this...". Then next step is to show them that there's nothing to fear - everything is documented, described and can be inspected on the go. In teams where pair-programming is a normal practice, I would typically watch their efforts with something in VSCode, IntelliJ, or even Vim and ask them if they'd want to see how I'd do the same/similar thing in Emacs. If the person is not interested, I won't push for it, but at that point, someone who worked with me on the same team knows that I can show them something entertaining and interesting to see, even if they don't get the immediate urge to dive into it.