Re: Some ideas with Emacs

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2019-12-07, at 03:13, Ag Ibragimov <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Fri 06 Dec 2019 at 10:30, Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> On 2019-12-03, at 07:07, Ag Ibragimov <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>>> Ooohweee, I've lost myself in the weeds of this discussion thread. It seems 
>>> writing a book about Emacs Lisp is an arduous task (no shit), writing a 
>>> comprehensive manual is not easy either.
>>>
>>> So I thought: what if we start a repository, make a pitch through social 
>>> platforms, get people interested, and start collecting various elisp 
>>> recipes. Then after a while, maybe we could form a curated list. After a 
>>> few, maybe several months, we gather enough material to make a book out of 
>>> that?
>>>
>>> "Emacs Lisp Cookbook" or something?
>>
>> No.
>>
>> You may indeed prepare a "cookbook", or a wiki this way - but not
>> a _book_.  A "book" (as opposed to a wiki, a _cookbook_ or a manual) is
>> something that _tells a story_.
>>
>> Best,
>
> I agree with that. However, I think "Elisp recipes" or "Elisp cookbook" is 
> exactly what we need and what's missing.
> You see, Emacs Lisp usually is not learned traditional way, you don't sit 
> down with a book that slowly explains concepts from the elementary to more 
> advanced topics. Also people don't do emacs-lisp "katas" or "koans". Usually 
> one gets into emacs-lisp when the need arises for solving a problem. It's not 
> that difficult to find help these days, people are always happy to help you, 
> we have r/emacs, mailing lists, emacs.stackexchange, various Gitter, Slack 
> and IRC channels, etc.
> But sometimes you don't even know you had a problem, until someone shows you 
> a solution to it. I think that kind of book, collective community effort 
> would be awesome to have.

I think that I could agree with that, though I personally like a more
structured exposition.

> But your point about a book that tells a story is also very valid. It would 
> be absolutely amazing to have a book written by a single person or small 
> group of co-authors, something titled like "Joy of Emacs" ("Joy of GNU/Emacs" 
> if you're so pedantic) where it also describes philosophy of the language, 
> historical context, contemplates about the future of the language, etc.

Now that you wrote that, I think this is really an amazing idea.  I am
a bit afraid I do not know enough about Emacs - and my plan is a bit
more humble anyway - but thanks for inspiration.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl