Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 18:43, Karl Fogel <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Different people will naturally learn at different rates, depending
> on their aptitude and environment. The best environment is to have
> an Emacs expert nearby in person, who can occasionally watch the
> newcomer edit and point out faster ways to do things, point out ways
> to ask Emacs for help, etc. But even in that kind of environment,
> with a talented newcomer, I don't think I've seen it take less than
> approximately a year to get to the point where they are doing better
> with Emacs than they would have done with some less extensible, less
> capable text editor.


The fun factor is getting absent from the discussion. Let me bring it
back in.

1.
==

When I started using using Solaris in a laboratory in the university
in the mid-90s I tried to learn vi - and for me that was torture.
After some time I bought a 386 and a CD with one of the first
GNU/Linux distributions, and I tried Emacs. No computers in the
university had Emacs - all the sysadmins were against it.

After a few hours playing with Emacs I found how to write my own .el
files and execute them. After a few days I found C-x C-e and I was
mind-blown by it. That was in the beginning of my holidays, and after
that during two months I spent practically all my time awake playing
with Emacs and using it to learn how use the GNU/Linux system that
came with it. Why? Because it was fun.

2.
==

In 2019 I had two opportunities to teach Emacs to friends who are
professional programmers (note: I don't interact much with
professional programmers in real life). It wouldn't work to show to
them what Emacs is capable of doing, to tell them that they would be
able to use Emacs for everything if they would invest 2000 hours in
that, or to show them that Emacs is a better _editor_ than their
favorite editors, that were vim and VSCode - especially because I am
not a very proficient user of Emacs-the-editor myself...

...so I helped them install Emacs in their machines, showed them the
basic ideas of Lisp, showed them how to open tutorials that were 80%
about Emacs-the-Lisp-environment and only 20% about Emacs-the-editor,
and helped them to follow the explanations, instructions, and
exercises. They loved it.

3.
==

A few days ago I discovered, reading discussions in this mailing list,
that I am not the only old-timer who has found Org difficult to learn,
and who has learned only tiny bits of it even after struggling with it
a lot.

I think that I found Org hard because learning it was not fun in the
same sense as learning Emacs was... I found the examples in the manual
very hard to run, and the feature of Org in which I was most
interested - code blocks - depended on many concepts that were treated
as black boxes.

We are trying to discuss what could make Emacs more appealing, easier
to learn, etc, etc, and how answers to these questions could become
features, videos, and tutorials.

There are several very different ways to make features, videos, and
tutorials that are "good". Some of these ways are very common now -
powerful features, very smart "Do what I mean" buttons, well-produced
videos with smiling presenters, with promises of productivity, fame,
and fortune... but there are some ways of making "good" things that
were very common some decades ago, but now are less so: the main key
terms are "elegance" and "hackeability".

I have even tried to make an experimental/prototype-ish tutorial for
Org following these ideas, but I didn't get very far. I even asked
some questions in the Org mailing list in nov/2019 and got answers for
them, but my original plan was to write a handful of new functions for
Org that would show the sub-actions of running `C-c C-c' on a code
block - see:

  (info "(org)Evaluating code blocks")

but I found the source code too hard to understand, and gave up after
some days.

There are also other parts of Emacs that I tried to understand but
gave up - for example, I've never been able to understand how to use
edebug, and I've only been able to learn the most basic things about
eshell, but a few days ago Sacha Chua posted this video in her Emacs
News, and this gave new hopes...

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1f2tulD9N8

Maybe we can try to coordinate people who have similar notions of
"good", "fun", "elegant", and "hackable", and try to form groups to
discuss and write tutorials?... I have the impression that these
tutorials can yield good material for discussion with people outside
the groups of writers - including package authors...

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://angg.twu.net/emacsconf2019.html
    http://angg.twu.net/emacs.html