Tips for Emacs Beginners

Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. — Neal Stephenson

Q: Why should I learn emacs? Ive heard 'real programmers' use emacs…
A: Real programmers use their brain
Real programmers program their brain
Often, real programmers' brain-programming program is emacs. — Thien-Thi Nguyen

Well that's the advertisement…
Lets get down to some details – how to start using emacs

Baby Steps 0

You can start the tutorial with C-h t
Which unforunately wastes about 200 lines saying that C-f C-b C-p C-n will do the work of ↑ ↓ ← →
I suggest you ignore this archaism

Functional Programming: A Moving Target

In my last post, I gave a functional programming time line in the last 50 years. Now I'll look at two things: The place of functional in ACM Curriculum 2013 and how C has messed up the notion of functional.

ACM Curriculum 2013

Functional Programming: A Timeline

Rob Hagan at Monash had shown that you could teach students more Cobol with one semester of Scheme and one semester of Cobol than you could with three semesters of Cobol.
Richard O'Keefe on Erlang list

Well that was before Functional Programming hit the headlines.
These days FP is quite a buzzword. Is this for good or bad?
If real world ≡ good well then Scala and Clojure and Erlang and Haskell becoming more and more 'real world' is a wonderful thing.
If what is good is understanding, then I am not so sure. Many things about programming, pedagogy and programming-pedagogy that were widely understood in the 1970s and 80s have mysteriously become un-understood today.
However in this darkening of the age there are some glimmers… eg ACM's 2013 curriculum.
In this post I would like to delineate a timeline of the semantics and significance of Functional in the last 50 years. In subsequent posts I'll try to deconstruct how the semantics has shifted around in this time.

Timeline

1957

The first programming language – Fortran

1957

The first functional programming language – For(mula)Tran(slator)

Why? Whoa! How?

Read on…

Between Poverty and Universality lies Structure

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself           —  Eric Raymond

In ancient times people set each other puzzles such as:

       Can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it?

These puzzles-of-omnipotence can be rephrased in theory-of-computation lingo:

       Can God compute the uncomputable?
       If he can, how is it uncomputable?
       If he cant, how is he God?

So what are those limits of/by structure?  Unsurprisingly related to God-el's theorem:

God-el's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause it to self-destruct
Gödel-Escher-Bach

And like record players what about programming languages whose abstractions can be arranged to break the language?

Structure is good because it reduces breakage; its bad because it imprisons us into precooked forms.

Following I explore the space between poverty and universality; a space which for want of a better word I will simply call structure, the most elusive being the structure of syntax.

Apply-ing SI on SICP

Abelson and Sussman wrote a legendary book: SICP. The book has a famous wizard cover:

Unfortunately the cover misses some key content of the book.  What is it?
If we remove the other wizardly stuff, three main artifacts stand out on that cover:  eval and apply on the crystal ball and a magical λ.  Lets put these into a table

apply	eval
lambda

The fourth empty square seems to stand out, doesn't it?  Lets dig a little into this square.

Functional Programming – the lost booty

Lisp was conceived in 1958 and already implemented by the early 60s.  One of its strange features was something called 'garbage-collection' … which took 35 years to enter the mainstream in Java.

Which is to say that for 35 years:

• CS researchers did whatever they were doing for their tenure, (sorry) publications
• Programming teachers righteously beat their students on their knuckles for getting pointer-errors/core-dumps/segfaults etc…