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Showing posts from January, 2008

Emergency Elisp

Are you an Emacs user but don't know Lisp? Welcome to my first Emacs Lisp primer! This should hopefully help get you over the hurdle so you can have more control over your Emacs sessions. There are lots of ways to do things in Lisp, and some are "Lispier" than others. I'm going to focus on how to do things you probably already know how to do from C++ or Java. I'm mostly focusing on the language itself, since that's arguably the hardest part. There are tons of Emacs-specific APIs that you can learn how to use from the documentation. Lisp is good at some things (like code that generates code) and not so good at others (like arithmetic expressions). I will generally avoid talking about good vs. bad, and just talk about how to do things. Emacs Lisp is like any other language – you get used to it eventually. Most Lisp introductions try to give you the "Tao of Lisp", complete with incense-burning, chanting, yoga and all that stuff. What I really wan

Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter

I'm always getting criticized for writing long blogs. "Way too verbose! Couldn't he have said all that in two paragraphs?" Not everyone feels that way, of course; lots of people tell me to keep doing what I'm doing. But the size critics are doggedly persistent. And I don't think it's just people who are slow readers. Even friends of mine will sometimes advise me to trim my entries down, which is a surprise, since I thought most of them would have picked up on the cause and effect relationship between blog length and popularity. Evidently not! So, like, let's get this out in the open: I'm doing it on purpose . Yes, sure, I could do with an editor (the people kind), but only if said editor were on board with long blogs, because that's the kind I want to write. In short, I think long blogs have better survival characteristics: greater reach and greater impact. And I've decided to celebrate the august occasion of the 1000th kneebiter