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vkazanovyesterday at 4:58 PM1 replyview on HN

I did.

After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to write my thesis in electrical engineering.

The tool was parsing my matlab files and generated latex, which i then made into the final pdf, complete with formulaes and calculations.

So instead of writing a decent thesis, i learned about makefiles, latex, emacs lisp and the fact that parsers are very interesting.

Also, Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp.

Surely, i did not work a single day as an electric engineer.

PS I keep looking for this book to this very day


Replies

jr_isidoreyesterday at 8:15 PM

GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. In other words, it does a neophyte no good to see the matrix without having lived in it first. It's all one can manage learning emacs's editing primitives if you've never seen it before. Reminding them some (but not all!) of these primitives are in fact elisp expressions is just annoying.

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