23 May, 2005
From the weekend
New website
I managed to finish my exam marking over the weekend and still have time to update my site.
I finally got around to converting my content to run on my shiny new custom content management system.
Go and have a look. Tell me if anything breaks.
All you need is emacs
We (the creative computing group at Coventry) were discussing which IDE or editor to use for teaching Python a few weeks past, and emacs came up.
We all agreed that forcing emacs on people probably wasn't a great idea, so we've adopted an editor-indifferent approach. I made a comment about needing a whole module just for emacs, because if we were going to ask people to use it, they might as well use it properly.
Then, over the weekend, I realised that everything we teach could be taught through emacs, or at least be enhanced by it...
- Programming - use emacs lisp, in emacs
- Design and usability - emacs has a design and interface different to most editors, and surely the emacs usability dichotomy is worth exploring. I personally think it's the most usable editor ever created, other people think it's a scary monster that requires magic words to get things done.
- Network and Internet programming - write your code in emacs, test it in emacs, browse the web in emacs.
There's more, and I can justify emacs for any of our modules.
So maybe an emacs module at the beginning of the course wouldn't be a bad idea. Even better, lets just make it an emacs course.
Now to post this, was it M-x please-post-to-blogger or C-c C-O M-t? Or was it M-x postblog? Pah!
