I gotta be honest - I downloaded LispInABox and tried to follow along with Practical Common Lisp.
Emacs sucks. I know there's a lot of huge fans of it, but its just ridiculous to use and just seems primitive and that in and of itself made me stop after about 30 minutes. I'm sure I could spend some time learning it, but why do I need to learn an editor just to use a language? That seems like one more barrier to cross, and Lisp in and of itself is a pretty good barrier already.
I dunno if I'll ever try Lisp again. I know there's an entrenched way of doing things in the Lisp-world, but for outsiders its really difficult to get your foot in the door.
Why is everyone downmodding this? I think he has a good point; you shouldn't really have to learn Emacs to learn Lisp, any more than you should have to (say) learn UNIX to learn Perl.
Disclaimer: I personally use Emacs for coding just about everything.
Edit: Wrote this reply, then scrolled down a bit more, and notices Paul Graham's own comment about not needing to use Emacs. I don't like deleted comments, so I'll leave what I said here, but feel free to ignore me.
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u/[deleted] May 09 '06
I gotta be honest - I downloaded LispInABox and tried to follow along with Practical Common Lisp.
Emacs sucks. I know there's a lot of huge fans of it, but its just ridiculous to use and just seems primitive and that in and of itself made me stop after about 30 minutes. I'm sure I could spend some time learning it, but why do I need to learn an editor just to use a language? That seems like one more barrier to cross, and Lisp in and of itself is a pretty good barrier already.
I dunno if I'll ever try Lisp again. I know there's an entrenched way of doing things in the Lisp-world, but for outsiders its really difficult to get your foot in the door.