Re: update intro to Emacs Lisp programming

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

On May 20, 2018, at 12:38, Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> wrote:

The popular way of learning _when Elisp Intro
was written_ was studying books.

Although the Elisp introduction is a special book, since you can read it in Emacs and evaluate the code it displays right in the buffer.

What I was saying was that in the 80's-90's, ie before computing became widespread thanks to common access to the internet, books needed to be self contained. So there was a lot of redundant contents between books in inside the books. Now, thanks to the availability of all sorts of programming tutorials in all sorts of media, hyperlinking and other niceties, it is much easier to learn about the concepts of computing (variables/loops/conditions/ etc.) and then to try to apply that to any given language, without that knowledge making you a computer programmer.

As a summary to what I wrote earlier, plus some extra:

1) What Richard requested and that is relatively urgent: the Emacs Lisp Introduction should be first checked for factual errors (an expert is needed there),

2) it needs to be edited to trim all the verbosity that is not required anymore (maybe cut 1/3)

3) it needs to be better linked to the Reference because there are code examples in the Reference that you don't  have access to when you check a function docstring. There should be links to the function description in the Reference *and* links to the various chapters.

4) there is a need to add a lot more exercices so that the learner can explore a lot more from what has been explained, possibly exercices that relate to "modern" computing domains

5) the structure needs a bit of dusting too

Jean-Christophe Helary
-----------------------------------------------
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune