Ionrock Dot Org

Over the weekend I took some time to get AutoMap running from Emacs. I knew this would not be difficult, so it seemed like the perferct project for a would be lisp hacker to start with. Unfortunately it was a bit too easy. I managed to write the functionality two ways. The first involved getting the current buffer file name and then starting an AutoMap process. The second way was call the compile command (M-x compile) with AutoMap as the compilier. I still had to get the buffer file name, but all the output and buffer creation for the log I got for free. In the end I used the second solution and added my own keybinding of C-c C-w C-w (the two C-w is for WebWorks of course) to start the process.

What struck me was how easy it was to make things happen in emacs. The documentation is really nice and testing things out is almost as simple as in Python. The negative side of this adventure is I really was only learning about Emacs Lisp and not necessarily edifying myself on the amazing lisp language.

In some ways, I got the impression that lisp is similar to Javascript. I know, I know, this is probably heresy to say. But the truth is, I have seen a lot of Javascript lately and it is extremely flexible. This makes it complicated at times, but overall, it become possible to adapt Javascript to other programming styles. Prototype and MochiKit are the obvious examples of this. Lisp seems to do a similar thing in how flexible it is with its functions, lists and general syntax. You get the feeling that you can just type a few words and make some magic happen. It is not at intuitive as Python and I don't feel as though I get to use my previous understanding of application design, but overall, lisp felt very natural.

My next step of course will be to delve into the wealth of lisp web frameworks and see what I like the best...