·······@runbox.com wrote:
> Emacs scares me (there, I said it!) Smalltalk seems to have the more
> productive environment...but Lisp seems to have more open-source code
> available.
>
> I'm developing and deploying on OS X, with FreeBSD as a possible
> deployment option in the distant future.
LispWorks for Macintosh has an excellent IDE and, what's more important
here, supports both Mac and Emacs key bindings. Since on a Mac, the
Control and Command keys don't interfere with each other, this provides
a very nice path to smoothly try out some Emacs key bindings and learn
them over time without being thrown completely in the cold water.
I have been very slow in understanding what the advantages of Emacs are,
but it has started to make sense to me by now.
Pascal
This is good to know, Pascal. Mac key binding may ease my transition.
Are there any reasons NOT to use the LW editor? I ask only because it
seems very few people use it, relative to other options, even those who
predominantly use LW...?
Is it possible to use SBCL and the LW editor? Would that be called
'running SBCL as an inferior Lisp' to the LispWorks editor?
- Sergei
Up spake ·······@runbox.com:
> Are there any reasons NOT to use the LW editor?
A lot of people -- especially those who used UNIX at school -- grew up
with Emacs. Long-time emacs users have a *lot* of momentum; switching
to *any* other editor would take a big effort for us.
--
-trent
Capitalism had been tried. Communism has been tried. Even Henry George's
Single Tax has been tried, in Australia. Fascism, feudalism and
mysticism have been tried. Anarchism has never been tried.
In article <·······················@harpo.marx>, Trent Buck
<·········@tznvy.pbz> wrote:
> Up spake ·······@runbox.com:
> > Are there any reasons NOT to use the LW editor?
>
> A lot of people -- especially those who used UNIX at school -- grew up
> with Emacs. Long-time emacs users have a *lot* of momentum; switching
> to *any* other editor would take a big effort for us.
Learning new editor commands is fairly easy. About 25 years ago I was
using EDT commands in VAX/VMS (and a few other editors before that). By
1984 I was using ZMACS, an EMACS variant, on a Symbolics 3670 Lisp
Machine. Later, I used other editors, some EMACS-like, some just
cursor-based. (Meaning, "point and click.")
Today, I favor Haskell as a language, using as an editor either Xemacs
on a Mac or Eclipse, the de facto standard environment for many
languages.
My point is that to say that students using UNIX insist on EMACS is
misleading. They, of course, can insist on EMACS, and work elsewhere.
To any managers reading this, hiring someone on the basis of which
_editor_ they prefer or don't prefer is the height of silliness.
--Tim May
Up spake Tim May:
> > > Are there any reasons NOT to use the LW editor?
> >
> > A lot of people -- especially those who used UNIX at school -- grew up
> > with Emacs. Long-time emacs users have a *lot* of momentum; switching
> > to *any* other editor would take a big effort for us.
>
> Learning new editor commands is fairly easy.
I disagree. I haven't used Eclipse (mainly because I have had Bad
Experiences with Java and thus Eclipse is guilty by association). But I
wonder, how I'd do rectangular cuts? Or comment-dwim, or indent-region,
or info-lookup-symbol, or cyclebuffer-forward, or windmove-right? How
do I define derived modes?
Learning new bindings for basics (i.e. cut and past) might be easy, but
there's a *lot* more to it than that.
> My point is that to say that students using UNIX insist on EMACS is
> misleading. They, of course, can insist on EMACS, and work elsewhere.
Perhaps I was unclear, or missed something because I jumped into the
conversation at a late stage.
I'm thinking of a situation like this:
Boss: "I need this and this and this, and the environment is
LispWorks."
New Employee: "Sure, I can do that. Can I keep using Emacs?"
Boss: "Yeah, a couple of other engineers do that too."
I have a lot of experience using emacs. Having to relearn all that for
a different editor would be a lot of effort; if I can keep using Emacs I
can start working right away. Not to mention that I manage files,
shells, mail, news, versions, tasks and wikis and browse the web from
within emacs, and having to manage code in a different application
entirely would be unappetising to say the least.
> To any managers reading this, hiring someone on the basis of which
> _editor_ they prefer or don't prefer is the height of silliness.
Right. And so is forcing a particular editor on engineers.
--
-trent
<foo> For I am no longer a stranger in the ways of woman.
<bar> You finally killed one, eh?
On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 05:09:54 +0000, Trent Buck wrote:
> Up spake ·······@runbox.com:
>> Are there any reasons NOT to use the LW editor?
>
> A lot of people -- especially those who used UNIX at school -- grew up
> with Emacs. Long-time emacs users have a *lot* of momentum; switching
> to *any* other editor would take a big effort for us.
I'm thinking one of these with a good editor would be perfect.
http://kinesis-ergo.com/professional.htm
Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
> A lot of people -- especially those who used UNIX at school -- grew up
> with Emacs. Long-time emacs users have a *lot* of momentum; switching
> to *any* other editor would take a big effort for us.
Well, it's close enough to Emacs to me. Some things really annoy me
(like C-X 2 opening a second window instead of splitting the pane),
but all in all I think the tight integration with the debugging tools
is worth the small pain of learning to operate two flavors of emacs
at the same time (But then my first exposure to emacs was using two
different Emacs clones (AMIS and FINE) more than 20 years ago, and
my long-time favourite "emacs" was FRED, so I'm sort of used to working
with several flavors of emacs from day one).
--
(espen)
Up spake Espen Vestre:
> Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
>
> > A lot of people -- especially those who used UNIX at school -- grew up
> > with Emacs. Long-time emacs users have a *lot* of momentum; switching
> > to *any* other editor would take a big effort for us.
>
> Well, it's close enough to Emacs to me.
I should add that I haven't actually tried the LW editor[0]. When I
think about it, LW (the company) is the descendant of Lucid, right? And
Lucid Emacs is what XEmacs used to be called? Perhaps it isn't so
different as, say, DrScheme.
[0] I've tried slime, ilisp and cmuscheme under GNU Emacs 21.
--
-trent
Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz> writes:
> I should add that I haven't actually tried the LW editor[0]. When I
> think about it, LW (the company) is the descendant of Lucid, right?
No.
According to Trent Buck <·········@tznvy.pbz>:
> I should add that I haven't actually tried the LW editor[0].
It is close enough to Emacs for government work. ;-)
I'm a long-time vi/vim user. I learnt Emacs when I learnt Common Lisp.
These days I use Emacs for Common Lisp (and Python sometimes), LispWorks's
Emacsy editor when using that, Leafpad for writing Chinese, and vim for
everything else. Oh, and whatever that comes with whatever Smalltalk
implementation I happen to be using.
I don't think it is too tough to become productive enough in more than one
editor to do useful work with them.
--
Ng Pheng Siong <····@netmemetic.com>
http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps -+- M2Crypto, ZServerSSL for Zope, Blog
http://www.sqlcrypt.com -+- Database Engine with Transparent AES Encryption
·······@runbox.com wrote:
> This is good to know, Pascal. Mac key binding may ease my transition.
> Are there any reasons NOT to use the LW editor? I ask only because it
> seems very few people use it, relative to other options, even those who
> predominantly use LW...?
There are some things in LispWorks that you can only do with a mouse (or
so it seems to me). For people who want to do _everything_ with the
keyboard, this is possibly a problem.
Furthermore, LispWorks costs money. The free personal edition is
excellent in my opinion, but the fact that it stops working after five
hours is not nice. (I hope to be able to buy a license soon, then this
problem vanishes.)
> Is it possible to use SBCL and the LW editor? Would that be called
> 'running SBCL as an inferior Lisp' to the LispWorks editor?
That would be cool, but I don't think it exists. That's probably why
other people prefer Emacs because they don't need to switch their
working style when using a different CL implementation.
My preferred working style at the moment is to use LW even for other CL
implementations. I edit the code in LispWorks, and run it in other Lisps
from terminal windows. This has drawbacks, but works well for me.
Pascal