Subject: Re: I want to learn LISP From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1998/10/13 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3117248157194543@naggum.no> * Viktor Haag <viktor@peergroup.com> | Is Emacs-Lisp considered a reasonable way to "learn Lisp"? I know that | Emacs-Lisp is a different dialect to Common Lisp, but do you serious | Lispers consider it as "reasonable"? I have worked intimately with Emacs since 1993 and fixed a lot of bugs and tried very hard to keep Emacs Lisp reasonable. by 1996, I gave up that goal, but not the usefulness of Emacs, and I have since then worked on a private version of Emacs that has tracked the development version of Emacs sans MULE and other bad design decisions. unsurprisingly, almost all the bugs in recent development have been in the areas I decided were broken at the core, but worse, yet, the fixes made are even worse than what they tried to fix. Emacs Lisp for Emacs 19 is still reasonable (the latest version being 19.34). Emacs Lisp for Emacs 20 is no longer reasonable. (e.g., the lack of a character type, streams, filters, etc, makes MULE amazingly stupidly designed, and lots of other advanced features are incredibly kludgey because the language is no longer able to support further development.) XEmacs Lisp appears to be closer to Common Lisp. I have previously thought XEmacs was worse than Emacs in the "if we haven't reinvented it, it can't be any good" department, but it appears that XEmacs will not follow Emacs over to Guile, although I think XEmacs Lisp has more of a Scheme nature than Emacs Lisp with its myriads of accessors and other one-trick ponies. all in all, I think you should learn Emacs Lisp because it is so useful for a wide range of tasks, but depressingly little in Emacs Lisp is really smart, so you should at least consider implementing most of the stuff yourself in Common Lisp. #:Erik