Re: Where is Emacs Lisp taught ?

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

I am really asking about Emacs Lisp, not about any other Lisp dialect.

If it is included in a course on Lisp as a way to manipulate Emacs it's good, 
but that's really what I want to know.

Jean-Christophe 

> On Oct 25, 2018, at 7:24, Garreau, Alexandre <galex-713@galex-713.eu> wrote:
> 
> On 2018-10-24 at 18:02, Emanuel Berg wrote:
>> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm trying to gather information about Emacs
>>> Lisp and specifically about where it is taught
>>> (bootcamps/universities, etc.)
>>> 
>>> Has anybody information on that?
>> 
>> I don't think that Emacs Lisp in particular is
>> thought anywhere, but Lisp is thought at
>> universities around the world, sometimes as
>> part of courses in "functional programming",
>> where other languages might be included as
>> well, e.g. Haskell and Erlang (perhaps
>> sometimes SML).
> 
> Until then I heard they teached scheme from college 2nd year in the
> capital of the region (racket I guess, unless it’s mit-scheme), and
> everywhere else afaik it’s OCaml in France (maybe nationalism?).
> 
>> And I think it is better to teach CL than Elisp, in all honesty...
> 
> I am not sure.  Elisp is often to be considered a bad language, but it
> has the somewhat rare and paradoxal double advantage (peculiar to lisp,
> but more extreme here) of both having a simple and naive implementation,
> and yet being quite high level and extremely close to I/O.  It also is
> quite much used (I bet its usage proportion is comparable to CL and
> scheme united).
> 
> Those are obvious advantages when learning programming, and are main
> reasons why so far I saw stupidities such as using javascript, (damn)
> VisualBasic, or python, taught to students for learning programming:
> easy GUI, very imperative style, ability to do more or less functional
> stuff.
> 
> But in reality, what is important is not GUI, but easy access to I/O (so
> to easily develop concrete software that will solve concrete problems so
> to better discover how programming is useful), and usage potential:
> elisp, unlike scheme so far, has many interesting and powerful libraries
> for interacting with the internet, files, keyboard, screen, and these
> are extremely easy to use, compared to SDL C programming, VB GUI
> programming, GTK interface usage, or even shellscripts sometimes.
> 
> I believe, especially in first year, what is important is give to
> students what will make them want to pursue their studies, and, if they
> fail or stop them, to keep programming stuff.  So they need an
> environment regularly giving them interesting practical problems, and
> making them easy to solve.  In this respect, unless using some bad
> language such as python or javascript, differently bad languages such as
> elisp and bash are going to be way more useful and simple to learn and
> not to forgot.
> 
> I’d like to see some course introduce “emacs macros”, then some lisp
> config, then progressively teach people how to program without them even
> knowing it, like I saw it happened to some people before (like first
> Gosling Emacs user, beside Gosling himself, iirc).  It would be cool.
> We need more programming literacy in general population.
> 

Jean-Christophe Helary
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