RE: First draft of the Emacs website

[Drew Adams]

> > If I were a 13-year old, and I knew little or nothing about Lisp or
> > Emacs, I would be interested to hear something about Emacs being
> > bathed in Lisp and being, in fact, a Lisp environment, and that I
> > (yes, as only a newbie Emacs user) could use some simple Lisp to
> > extend and customize Emacs to fit my 13-year-old self.  That would
> > be something that attracted me, as one 13 year-old, not something
> > that put me off. All newbies, and all 13 year-olds, are not the same.
> >
> > It has to be presented carefully, of course. There should be no
> > impression that one has to know Lisp to use Emacs. That doesn't mean
> > that we can't mention Lisp as one of the BIG advantages that Emacs
> > has to offer. Not to mention that would be, well, burying the lead -
> > the main story. IMHO.
> 
> Drew,
> 
> I'm might be able, as a seventeen year old (since two days!), to a
> somewhat interesting perspective on this. Some background information
> which might be useful:  I'm a GNU/Linux user for the past two/threeish
> years, emacs user since a year, a ex-vim user and tend to use the
> commandline a lot.
> 
> You're on the right track with the lisp thing and it's a very important
> thing to talk about but you're forgetting that the word Lisp doesn't
> really mean anything to people as young as me. I mostly know it as the
> thing that powers in Emacs and the old AI labs. What Lisp was to you is
> what Python is for us (at least I assume). Putting the emphasis on Emacs
> having a full porgramming language which just happens to be Lisp is, in my
> opinion, a better idea.
> 
> One of the biggest, if not the biggest, things that made me interested in
> Emacs was the ease of customization and the high amount of plugins
> available. One of the biggest thing that annoyed me with vim is how slow
> it would get if you tried to install any plugin on it. It would take a
> minute to start up.
> 
> Another thing are the great tools that Emacs has. Things like org-mode,
> eshell/ansi-term, gnus, etc... are one of the things we really should be
> spending more time on promoting. Recently I at least got one of my friends
> to try Emacs simply because he liked org-mode so much. Somewhat related is
> the fact that Emacs is such a powertool also helps. It really does feel
> like you can do anything and more with it.
> 
> Thank you for your time,
> 
> Valentijn

That all sounds good to me!  I think we agree on what's important
wrt the language environment for this editor, and wrt whether that
is something to point out to newbies, old and new alike.

At the end of the day, we do need to refer to the language by its
name, I think, but we could stress that it is a "Python-like"
language, to connect with what people might be more familiar with.
Concentrate on its features rather than its name: Why someone
should want to know that it is part of Emacs, even at the outset.
What it brings to Emacs and its users.

Point out that the extensive ability to customize Emacs, as well as
the plethora of available "plug-ins", are thanks to its Python-like
extension language (Lisp).