Re: Some ideas with Emacs

[Ag Ibragimov]

On Fri 06 Dec 2019 at 10:30, Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 2019-12-03, at 07:07, Ag Ibragimov <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Ooohweee, I've lost myself in the weeds of this discussion thread. It seems 
> > writing a book about Emacs Lisp is an arduous task (no shit), writing a 
> > comprehensive manual is not easy either.
> >
> > So I thought: what if we start a repository, make a pitch through social 
> > platforms, get people interested, and start collecting various elisp recipes. 
> > Then after a while, maybe we could form a curated list. After a few, maybe 
> > several months, we gather enough material to make a book out of that?
> >
> > "Emacs Lisp Cookbook" or something?
>
> No.
>
> You may indeed prepare a "cookbook", or a wiki this way - but not
> a _book_.  A "book" (as opposed to a wiki, a _cookbook_ or a manual) is
> something that _tells a story_.
>
> Best,

I agree with that. However, I think "Elisp recipes" or "Elisp cookbook" is 
exactly what we need and what's missing.
You see, Emacs Lisp usually is not learned traditional way, you don't sit down with a book that 
slowly explains concepts from the elementary to more advanced topics. Also people don't do 
emacs-lisp "katas" or "koans". Usually one gets into emacs-lisp when the need 
arises for solving a problem. It's not that difficult to find help these days, people are always 
happy to help you, we have r/emacs, mailing lists, emacs.stackexchange, various Gitter, Slack and 
IRC channels, etc.
But sometimes you don't even know you had a problem, until someone shows you a 
solution to it. I think that kind of book, collective community effort would be 
awesome to have.

But your point about a book that tells a story is also very valid. It would be absolutely amazing 
to have a book written by a single person or small group of co-authors, something titled like 
"Joy of Emacs" ("Joy of GNU/Emacs" if you're so pedantic) where it also 
describes philosophy of the language, historical context, contemplates about the future of the 
language, etc.