Re: What version of Lisp is running in EMACS?

[Tim X]

Daniel Klein <danielk@featherbrain.net> writes:

> On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 01:07:02 -0700, Xah Lee <xah@xahlee.org> wrote:
>
>>If you are a experienced programer, say, with at least 1 year full-
>>time programing experience, then you might try my tutorial
>>
>>Emacs Lisp Tutorial by Example
>>http://xahlee.org/emacs/elisp.html
>
> I'm looking at the tutorial now.
>

A much much better introduction to emacs lisp is Robert J Chassell's
"An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp", which is now bundled with
Emacs 22 or available from the GNU site. It has a much better structure,
is more consistent and well written and once combined with the Emacs Lisp 
Reference
(also bundled with Emacs 22) gives you everything you need. As an
additional benefit, it avoids the (often) ill informed pseudo political
rants Xah tends to pepper throughout much of his otherwise reasonable work
and information. 

However, if your ultimate plan is to learn Common Lisp, I would advise
against learning too much Emacs Lisp. While both languages are part of the
lisp family, there are considerable differences between them and these are
likely to cause confusion if your just beginning to learn one or the
other. 

While Emacs Lisp is almost essential if you want to become an 'Emacs power
user", many users find the editors features extremely useful and powerful
without ever having to learn emacs lisp. The combination of Emacs and SLIME
for a Common Lisp development environment is very powerful and initially is
easy to setup. The power of emacs means that you can make things as complex
and customized as you want, but don't be fooled. You don't need to go down
that road. You can get extremely powerful functionality with minimal
customization. A common mistake for new users is they feel they need to
start using the power of emacs lisp and start customizing everything right
away. Often, this is before they have used the system long enough to
appreciate why some settings are done the way they are or why some key
bindings seem 'unusual'. Once you have used the editor for some time, you
will find there is usually well thought out reasons why things have been
done/configured the way they have been. 


HTH

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au