[LispSea] Re: starting point

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Daniel J Pezely wrote:
>
> I'm not expecting business executives to attend presentations by Lisp programmers.
>   

Ok, I understand now.  And considering the amount of effort I've put 
into making Chicken Scheme end-user friendly, the packaging problems are 
definitely non-trivial.

XEmacs has a packaging system; in theory I could have gotten my Scheme 
modes from that.  In practice, the packaging download mechanism is 
broken on my Windows installation, due to some perverse interaction with 
MSYS.  It shouldn't be happening, because XEmacs is installed natively 
and shouldn't know about my MSYS environment.  So I had to manually 
install it, which wasn't hard as it's explained on the XEmacs site 
pretty well, but it increases the 'chore' level.  For sanity I also had 
to configure cua-mode.el to get the Ctrl-Z Ctrl-X Ctrl-C Ctrl-V behavior 
I'm used to.  Can't abide learning a whole new way to use my fingers.  
So that required the full learning curve about how to configure 
site-specific .el files.  Plus I had to check whether cua-mode.el worked 
with XEmacs; at one point I was led to believe that it didn't.  There's 
that GNU Emacs / XEmacs compatibility paranoia.

In principle, XEmacs is better for a Windows developer than GNU Emacs.  
In practice, it's not off-the-shelf.

For awhile I was going to use SchemeScript in Eclipse, on the principle 
that Windows users would find Eclipse more palatable than XEmacs.  But 
the plugin never worked properly for me.  I gave up several months ago 
and accepted XEmacs, which I had been resisting for a long time.

I still crank up Visual Studio because it has an easier-to-use Find In 
Files function than a grep command line.  Plus every time I try to bind 
grep to a keystroke, my settings aren't saved!  More futzing.  It takes 
awhile to get rid of the handicaps in XEmacs.  Especially if you're busy 
and mainly worried about slinging your code.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every