I might have converted someone this weekend. I had been babbling about Emacs, lisp, and the early 1980s to him for some time.
I told him that Emacs was a 37 year old tree, that it had carefully tended for all that time by a community of folks that really cared about doing things the right way, and the result was that it already knows how to do just about all the small tasks that you can imagine asking it to do. I started to demonstrate org sparse tree functionality[1], and he joked: "Yeah, yeah, but can it tell me what time sunset will be today?" So I fired up the info browser and started searching and in less than sixty seconds, we'd invoked M-x sunrise-sunset .[2] We didn't know our own longitude and latitude offhand, but it didn't matter: he was already impressed. After I assured him that this was a built in function, and that I'd really never heard of it until just now, he said that he would look into Emacs. :) --Dave [1] I should really make sure that I've memorized key bindings (well enough that enjoying a couple beers doesn't make me forget them) before trying this again. [2] On my work PC, this says "Cannot open load file: solar". Thank goodness it happened to work on my home laptop! (I won't fix this; no worries.)
