From: Shankar
Subject: Should I learn LISP?
Date: 
Message-ID: <4a0341c8.0204251243.6f820d68@posting.google.com>
My job doesn't require me to do any LISP programming, but I find that
most packages for emacs (I am a recent emacs convert) are written in
LISP.
I can use emacs fairly comforatably, but without any LISP commands.
Considering I already know perl, shell, sed and awk fairly well, is it
worth learning LISP so that I can become an emacs power user??
My gut feeling says that mastering LISP could well reduce my emacs
usage to half. But I am not sure. Any inputs will be appreciated.

Thanks!
From: Thien-Thi Nguyen
Subject: Re: Should I learn LISP?
Date: 
Message-ID: <kk9bsc7h189.fsf@glug.org>
··············@zaplet.com (Shankar) writes:

> My gut feeling says that mastering LISP could well reduce my emacs
> usage to half. But I am not sure. Any inputs will be appreciated.

probably your manaul usage will decrease while your programming usage
(and enjoyment) will increase.  the time you spend in emacs overall will
probably increase to somewhere around 100%.  go for it.

thi
From: Andy
Subject: Re: Should I learn LISP?
Date: 
Message-ID: <3CC92E36.80F2262D@smi.de>
I also just started with lisp and it changed a lot of my programming
stile in just a few week.
But you should know that Emacs lisp is a special lisp dialect so you
should be carefull when reading books about common lisp. Not all will
work as expected.
Best regards
AHz
From: Shankar
Subject: Re: Should I learn LISP?
Date: 
Message-ID: <4a0341c8.0204261435.251dcd81@posting.google.com>
Great .. do you have any pointers for quickly learning emacs lisp and
improve my efficiency?

-Shankar

> I also just started with lisp and it changed a lot of my programming
> stile in just a few week.
> But you should know that Emacs lisp is a special lisp dialect so you
> should be carefull when reading books about common lisp. Not all will
> work as expected.
> Best regards
> AHz
From: Nils Kassube
Subject: Re: Should I learn LISP?
Date: 
Message-ID: <878z79s42j.fsf@kursk.kassube.de>
··············@zaplet.com (Shankar) writes:

> Great .. do you have any pointers for quickly learning emacs lisp and
> improve my efficiency?

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EmacsLispIntro
From: Andy
Subject: Re: Should I learn LISP?
Date: 
Message-ID: <3CCD2E75.1EF09F3C@smi.de>
I didn't start with explicit emacs lisp so the following is for common
lisp:

I prefer to have books than online courses:
 - Paul Grahams "Ansi Common Lisp" is a great point to start. The
exercises
   are enlighting.
 - Peter Norvigs "Paradigms in artifical intelligence programing" is
more
   heavy but still excellent (you find for example some classic AI
problems and a
   scheme compiler explained).

 - The Lisp book from Patrick Winston should also be very good. But i
have not
   read it yet so i can say anything about it.

There are some excellent online sources also. Look at
  http://www.lisp.org/table/learn.htm#tutor
to find a start point. I found "Successful lisp" from David Lamkins very
impressive
but i didn't look at much more of the online courses for now (as i said
above
i prefer books ;-).
However, you will find plenty of material on that web site.
For my feeling it is most important to read as much lisp code as
possible to get
a feeling for the "art of lisp programming". Otherwise you will end up
with writing
Pascal or C or whatever you programming language is now.

Hope that helps
Best regards
AHz

 
     

Shankar wrote:
> 
> Great .. do you have any pointers for quickly learning emacs lisp and
> improve my efficiency?
> 
> -Shankar
> 
> > I also just started with lisp and it changed a lot of my programming
> > stile in just a few week.
> > But you should know that Emacs lisp is a special lisp dialect so you
> > should be carefull when reading books about common lisp. Not all will
> > work as expected.
> > Best regards
> > AHz
comp.lang.lisp / 2002 / apr