[HN Gopher] Emacs Speaks Statistics
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       Emacs Speaks Statistics
        
       Author : smartmic
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2024-09-21 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ess.r-project.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ess.r-project.org)
        
       | macleginn wrote:
       | My colleagues and I have been discussing recently if we should
       | use Positron IDE as a common environment for teaching R and
       | Python. Emacs is another option, of course.
        
         | setopt wrote:
         | I love Emacs, but I think it would be challenging to teach an
         | intro programming course using it these days. (We landed on
         | VSCode for teaching Python.)
        
           | nextos wrote:
           | The basics of Emacs are not that hard. One of my introductory
           | freshman courses taught us XEmacs in parallel, as we went
           | through Lex & Yacc.
           | 
           | Basically you need to learn a few basic movements, which are
           | also really useful on any terminal thanks to GNU Readline,
           | and a some basic concepts like the minibuffer, interactive
           | commands, etc. From there onward, things are quite easy to
           | discover little by little, especially with newer packages
           | like vertico, marginalia or which-key.
           | 
           | Obviously, its much harder than VSCode, but investing on
           | Emacs is IMHO worth the effort if one values stability. It
           | will be probably still relevant when most competing solutions
           | are gone. Plus, it offers great support for lots of niche
           | languages and workflows, like Org.
        
         | faizshah wrote:
         | I think it depends on how new your students are to programming.
         | If they are already coding and have their favorite IDE then it
         | would be nice to force them to try something new to see a
         | different workflow (even if they end up going back to vscode
         | later).
         | 
         | On the other hand for newer programmers you want to focus less
         | on the tools, installation and workflow and more on just
         | getting them programming. In that situation the batteries
         | included environments like RStudio would be preferred.
         | 
         | Another practical thing to think about is how much you and your
         | TAs want to wrestle with installation issues vs just giving
         | them a web based notebook environment like Colab.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-21 23:00 UTC)