On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 2:19 AM, Lee Spector <lspec...@hampshire.edu> wrote: > Certainly true, and this is one of the other reasons that I taught with > Eclipse/CCW rather than an emacs setup last year. But with a well-configured > modern emacs some of this can be ameliorated; e.g. there are Mac versions in > which you can use multiple windows for different buffers in an OS native way, > and use OS native navigation techniques, and find commands in menus, etc.
There are people that would kill for a Windows port of emacs that let you navigate, find capabilities, and find out about shortcut keys in an OS native way. Especially if it came with OS native help you could use the OS native help browser to browse. :) Well, at the very least, there are people that might actually try emacs (or try emacs again) if such a thing existed, but not otherwise... > My dream installer would produce as friendly a setup as possible, with > versions for most common platforms, and if this existed then I think that > students could go from zero to knowing what they need to know for an edit/run > cycle on this setup in one session. Yes they could spend years mastering it, > but they could do real work without mastering it or knowing anything about > how to tinker with it. Yes, a problem with emacs is that it doesn't follow either of the usual patterns. Some apps have a learning curve that's gentle, then plateaus -- simple things like Notepad. Others have one that starts out gentle and then takes off like an exponential function graph -- it's easy to become productive at simple tasks with these, but you can also do more wizardly things with time and practice. The easy part also gives you a "beachhead" in its territory; no matter how complex the advanced features are, at least such basic things as locating and searching the documentation, changing the advanced feature's settings, the general navigation mechanics, etc. are familiar, giving you a starting point. The emacs learning curve, by contrast, is like a sheer cliff of solid ice without hand or foothold. :) > A lot of the bad complexity of Eclipse (and I guess Netbeans, though I have > less experience there) has to do with things that will be handled elegantly > by leiningen from the command line in an emacs/lein setup. Yes, possibly. Would that the Eclipse/CCW modern graphical editor, namespace browser, REPL, and other features could be used with lein instead of Eclipse's own build configurators. > I guess I would rank the emacs/slime/lein installation/configuration problem > as a high priority because I think that solving it would produce a good way > for newbies to get started with just one step (with the downside of the emacs > interface learning curve, to whatever extent that can't be addressed via > configuration) That's not a "downside", that's a pit full of sharks with lasers on their heads, at least from your hypothetical newb's perspective, unless it was really REALLY tamed. That Mac version MIGHT do it, but only for Mac users and only if OS-native shortcut keys for common tasks (save, save as, change to mru nonfocused window, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo) are supported or an installer can easily configure that. Nothing will annoy a new user of the app that isn't new to the OS more than being tripped up if they try to use keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse to get a task like that accomplished. Oh, and I do hope clicking, click-drag-selecting, and so on in the editor windows would not violate Least Surprise either. With ports of nonnative software you often can't even count on that. That and command-X not being bound to "format filesystem" instead of "cut" are the most crucial I'd think there. Windows users, OTOH, will apparently be SOL for the foreseeable unless you have an alternative Windows editor that'll do and is sufficiently native in its UI behavior. > BTW I'm an old lisper who has lived a lot in emacs but I've mostly avoided > having to tinker with it, so the hoops that I had to jump through to set > things up for Clojure didn't come naturally to me. Part of this is probably > because I spent a fair amount of time using Lisp machines and then a long > stretch using MCL which had the wonderful FRED (FRED Resembles Emacs > Deliberately) editor Ah, the familiar hacker GRAT (GRAT Recursive Acronym Trick). Gotta watch out for that. :) > that combined all of the power of Emacs with single-drag installation and a > thoroughly OS (Mac) native interface. FRED still lives on in some forms, > including MCLIDE, which has Clojure support (but it's Mac only and has some > other issues). Why are the poor Windows users left out? For that matter, why are the poor Gnome/KDE users, many of them Windows refugees that want a GUI and applications that act Windowslike (minus all the crashing and viruses), left out? -- Protege: What is this seething mass of parentheses?! Master: Your father's Lisp REPL. This is the language of a true hacker. Not as clumsy or random as C++; a language for a more civilized age. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
