<philip.armitage@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| There is a general assumption on this group that those who don't use
| emacs are "clueless". I certainly hope for my own sake that this isn't
| the case (but I guess it's a paradox: do the "clueless" know that they
| are?!).
+---------------
It's not *always* cluelessness. In my case it's simply having
learned "the moded way" nearly four decades ago [hint: TECO]
and thus being much more comfortable with moded editors such
as Vi in which most editing commands are lower-case letters
(or at worst, upper-case). Conversely, my fingers simply don't
work well with the monster chords Emacs wants. Sobeit. Using
Vi doesn't get in my way, so it's a non-issue for me.
+---------------
| I don't understand why we celebrate the choice that the Lisp world
| offers when referring to the multitude of implementations yet
| inexplicably have the opposite opinion when it comes to editors?
+---------------
Well, I certainly am willing to believe that Emacs+Slime is *better*
for coding Lisp in the hands of an expert (if your fingers permit
their use!) than other editors/IDEs. The only question for me is
how *much* better? My personal experience [reported elsewhere, so
I'll be brief here] is that the answer is -- for me -- not *enough*
better to be worth the pain of switching. Look, to my knowledge
my choice of editor has *never* been an obstacle (or at least not
so large that I noticed) to coding in either Scheme or Common Lisp.
+---------------
| To me, getting programmers using Lisp is the most important point.
+---------------
Yup. In the words of his Kennyness, "Shut up & code!" Whatever editor
you already have that you feel comfortable with is almost certainly
"good enough" to start coding in Lisp... to get very far, in fact.
+---------------
| I know for a fact that some users of ABLE have eventually moved
| to Slime once they were comfortable with CL...
+---------------
Sure, but the important thing is to *start coding*...
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org>
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