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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine asked me this recently: are there many young programmers investing in emacs? I only know a few... it's kind of depressing.

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Why is it depressing?

I have asked before if I will gain anything moving from Eclipse / Aptana to Emacs or VI. It will take a lot of learning, and while Eclipse is far from perfect, I have wrestled with it enough to know what I am doing. And it has lots of plugins.

(I am a not especially young programmer).

Yes, at least in my circle of coder-friends. Younger people seem to be using some new-fangled thing like Sublime more often, but there's still plenty of us using and hacking on emacs. Don't worry, we won't let it die.

I'm a current undergrad at MIT and I still see it (and use Emacs myself). Vim and Sublime are more popular though. Vim and Sublime are probably around equal, followed by Emacs.

I graduated from undergrad last year working at AWS. Of ~30 engineers on the team, there's 2 of us using emacs. The other guy is around his mid 30's.

I'll be using emacs as the sole text editor with my students in September, so there'll be a few more young programmers learning how to use it.

I hope you will be teaching Intro to Emacs. Why else would you impose a text editor on students?

I don't know who Marc is teaching, but you would be astonished by how many undergrads in a computer information systems course do not know what a text file is. They'll take a programming course with C# in Visual Studio, and come away thinking that you can only program in Visual Studio with Visual Studio files. Then you get them in a database course the next semester and assign them some SQL, and they'll try to write their scripts in Word.

Can't blame them for not learning what the previous teachers didn't teach, but I'd sure blame myself if they got to day 2 in my class and I didn't correct it. Now I tend to start my classes by haranguing them to install Notepad++ or whatever alternative exists for Mac users.

I'm getting a little sick of Notepad++ and this thread has me thinking I should give emacs a try. (Probably not for my students though!)

Intro to programming with any kind of Lisp as a language could be a good reason to do this. Unless the Lisp in question is Racket - DrRacket is quite nice Lisp IDE if you remember to enable a few options (like auto-pairing of parens, which I have no idea why would be disabled in any Lisp environment by default...).

I'm confused as to why I wouldn't teach students how to use a text editor. What else would you suggest they write their code using?

You aren't teaching them to use a text editor. You are teaching them to use emacs. A choice based on your personal preference that wastes lots of their time learning what is a very complicated environment. You need to write lisp just to make emacs auto indent on return.

Nano or gedit in comparison would be sensible choices if you were interested in teaching students about the language rather than indoctrination in the editor wars.

Unless of course it's a lisp class in which case Emacs is a sensible choice, but i think you would have mentioned that if it were the case.

> You need to write lisp just to make emacs auto indent on return.

I wanted to say that it's not true, but fortunately I went and checked and found this (in my programming-mode hook):

    (local-set-key (kbd "<return>") 'newline-and-indent)

in my Emacs config. I thought that it's configurable via `customize-*` interface, which is as nice as any other editor "settings" dialog, but apparently it's not...

OTOH I'd rather write Lisp than JSON or Python for editor configuration, but you're right in that it's personal preference.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend making Emacs the required editor for any programming course (if not using Lisp). Just disallow using IDEs and let the students choose their editors. Make a list of mandatory features, like syntax highlighting, and let them use whatever they feel comfortable with. That way you can focus on teaching programming instead of teaching how to use an editor.

23 year old third year computer science student. I only know of two students (me included) that are emacs users.

Same here. The intro course taught us emacs and vi in the first course. Then kinda left it up to us. Only a small handful stuck with them. People either loved it, or hated it.

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