Re: update intro to Emacs Lisp programming

[Van L]

> Jean-Christophe Helary writes:
> 
> The problem with the introduction is that it was written when programming was 
> only starting to be a skill "normal" people could have access to. So the text 
> is extremely verbose and is sometimes hard to follow because of that. The 
> gist of the document could be summarized in 50 pages.

This intro compares well relative to Digital Ocean’s intro to Python published 
more recently.

Lisp has an interesting history and A.I. is a very hot potato topic in the 
imagination. The intro ranges to robots! I looked for `super’ as in super 
intelligence. 

#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE

  d6adf7e7 (Glenn Morris             2012-05-28   882) @node Lisp History
  8cda6f8f (Glenn Morris             2007-09-06   883) @unnumberedsec Lisp 
History
  8cda6f8f (Glenn Morris             2007-09-06   884) @cindex Lisp history
  8cda6f8f (Glenn Morris             2007-09-06   885) 
  8cda6f8f (Glenn Morris             2007-09-06   886) Lisp was first developed 
in the late 1950s at the Massachusetts
  8cda6f8f (Glenn Morris             2007-09-06   887) Institute of Technology 
for research in artificial intelligence.  The
  8cda6f8f (Glenn Morris             2007-09-06   888) great power of the Lisp 
language makes it superior for other purposes as
  8cda6f8f (Glenn Morris             2007-09-06   889) well, such as writing 
editor commands and integrated environments.

  d6adf7e7 (Glenn Morris             2012-05-28   899) @node Note for Novices
  d6adf7e7 (Glenn Morris             2012-05-28 11084) @node Building Robots

#+END_EXAMPLE

> Paul Eggert writes:

> Could you write a simplified introduction that is only 50 pages or so? That 
> would be helpful to many potential users, I'd think.

Can we collect a list of 12 ideas in ranked progression from easy to medium, 
each to be explored to three levels of difficulty for beginner, intermediate, 
and advanced which would be condensed in 43 pages? I can attempt an intro but 
I’m not ready, yet. A busy journalist could read the 50-pages by learning one 
idea per day and towards the end figure out how to send a tip to the newspaper, 
confidentially, within Emacs Lisp. Just an idea.