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Just to add: the built-in "Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" is also really really great. I have been using emacs for a while, with one framework or another, but always hesitated actually learning lisp. I was too focused on learning the kinds of languages and systems that might get me a job, and it felt like too big of a venture in learning a whole language just for my development environment. Now, I have a given up on the employable thing, and have been enlightened by SICP and lispey languages, and in general, the simple beauty of Emacs itself, not just what I can make it do. It takes only a little time to get comfortable with the nested (), and weird vocabulary, and it just really will click with you at some point, how simple it all really is, how every function bears on the simple syntactic principles of the language as whole, its lists all the way down! You can see the language work, by looking at the code. It may not get me a fancy computer job, but I think I am happier on the whole anyway, giving myself to lisp. Something therapeutic about it. |
Fun anecdote: I've got my copy of SICP signed by both authors for Sussman invited me to have tea in his office and when I arrived the next day, by sheer chance, Abelson was there too! They joked that had I been there 30 minutes early Sussman's wife, who proofread the book, would have signed it too! I've got a cool pic taken at that moment: me standing along these two legends and proudly holding the purple book... I'll post that pic and full story the day I have a blog.
Besides that I pretty much live inside Emacs. The occasional elisp (3000 lines of custom elisp hackery over the decades) and lots of Clojure/ClojureScript.