Comments on: #lisp FEP - I want to learn lisp but I don’t want to use emacs

By: Vermeil

Vermeil — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:12:14 +0000

Except for those “important words”, your post strongly implies that you presuppose that no sensible reason for not choosing Emacs exists and that you associate “smart people” with Emacs. The second alternative even states by analogy that Emacs is a *prerequisite* for learning Lisp.

I’ve taught programming for several years, and have been active in PL forums even longer. I’ve helped people learn C/C++, Perl, and Tcl (and some more to lesser extent), and I have *never* found any reason to demand that the learners should use some specified environment to enable me to help them.

Still, I *can* imagine one reason: that the interface/environment is simply too intrusive to allow a programming discussion that is decoupled from it. If that is the case, I submit that using Emacs to learn Lisp is highly sub-optimal for anyone, on #lisp or anywhere else.

By: splittist

splittist — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:40:50 +0000

@Vermeil

Note two important words in the title: “#lisp” and “learn”. It is quite possible to be a fabulous lisp programmer and not use Emacs. It is possible to learn lisp without using Emacs. It is highly sub-optimal for most on #lisp to try to learn lisp without using Emacs.

By: Vermeil

Vermeil — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:51:24 +0000

Find another community.

Lisp is one of my favorite languages, but I keep getting fed up with it. One reason is this pervasive “Emacs is the One True editor” nonsense. Does using Emacs make you all so miserable that you need to compensate by belittling people who prefer not to use it?

No, I won’t be running *to* you. I prefer to run *away* from people like you.

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 01:46:48 +0000

To me, the main problem with Emacs is that it’s fugly. Besides, I like doing i, Ctrl-V, y, p, :w, :q, etc. But the Russian argument is flawed. You’re not learning new letters; you’re learning a new alphabet. And in theory, you could use the Roman alphabet rather than the Cyrillic, though I doubt many Russians would appreciate that. I’ve never tried Russian, but if it’s anything like German, grammar (especially cases) is going to be much more difficult than learning a few new letter representations.

By: Larry Clapp

Larry Clapp — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:51:19 +0000

I can’t stand A2. That would be more applicable to APL (unless it’s changed since 1986 :). How about “I want to learn Russian but don’t want to move to Russia to do it” ?

That said … I abandoned work on slim-vim and purchased Lispworks Professional. So *I* moved to Russia.

But it’s still a stupid comparison.

By: splittist

splittist — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:10:32 +0000

@ref

I've found the combination of an sbcl msi package (like this, no doubt outdated by now, so look here), a Windows-adapted emacs (like this one), some asdf magic (such as this) and a vanilla slime works great. (Except for "C-c C-c" at the repl killing the underlying sbcl - but I guess just shouldn't write non-terminating loops...)

By: splittist

splittist — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:00:20 +0000

@mfh

Indeed, Dandelion could well be worth a look (but I don’t really know how it compares to Cusp). And, indeed, the commercial CL’s have their own more-or-less clickibunti IDEs. I get the impression, however, that their editors are emacsen, even if they have a thin layer of Windows-like keybindings as an option.

By: ref

ref — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 18:21:26 +0000

I tried to learn Lisp on Windows using emacs+slime+sbcl but I couldn´t make it work. I had success with xemacs+clisp. For a newbie like me it´s too difficult, so it´s better to use a commercial free edition or trial but I wanted to use a open source implementation. If only there was a packaged distribution …

By: cap

cap — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:54:02 +0000

If you want to have the best of both worlds, use a vi editing-mode! (e.g. viper)

By: mfh

mfh — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:54:12 +0000

There are a few quite sophisticated IDE’s for CL, for those who aren’t Emacs fans. Eclipse has a CL plugin called Dandelion, and many of the commercial CL’s offer their own IDE’s.