#welcome

I first started programming in 1980 on a Heathkit H-8 in Basic (Benton Harbor) when I was 10, and in the intervening 30-odd years I've programmed more-or-less competently in Basic, Modula-2, C, Turbo Pascal, Clipper, C++, Rexx, Bourne Shell, Perl, PHP and Javascript.

I've also been exposed to many other languages---Forth, COBOL, Fortran, Java, C#, Ruby, Python, and so forth. By exposed I mean I can read and perhaps divine the intent of simple, straightforward code, but wouldn't easily understand complex code or write anything of any significance.

And of course I've probably forgotten most of that stuff anyway---I have no memory of even the barest syntax of Modula-2, say---not that I suppose it matters much: if you look at that list there's not a whole lot to strongly distinguish one language from another.

Sure, some are strongly typed and some are weakly typed and some are compiled and others aren't, but in the end they're all imperative languages (sometimes with functional features baked in), and the ones that I'm really familiar with all fall into the general ALGOL family of languages.

Which is why Haskell has been so interesting to study and attempt to use---which is what I've been doing for the last year or so. And I still feel like I'm taking baby steps.

Like a parent dutifully taking home videos of those baby steps, I've decided to do a little log of my work with Haskell, both to remind me of what I've accomplished and perhaps entertain others.

I was first exposed to the Emacs command set some time in 1990, while I was a sophomore in college; I owned an Atari ST, and stumbled across a port of Conroy's uEmacs for TOS. It was a good little editor---capable and easy to use. In fact, as I was learning C at the time, I spent some time converting the source to ANSI C as an exercise.

I have used and even become pretty facile with a couple of other editors---I spent a lot of my last couple of years of college using Turbo Pascal, whose embedded editor used a command set derived from WordStar, and in my first job out of college I spent a lot of time writing Clipper code using Brief---but I've always had Emacs hovering in the background.

Then in 1994 I lucked into a job as a system administrator for a Unix system and even started using Linux as my primary desktop OS. The logical editor for me to start using was GNU Emacs, and I've never really looked back.

I use GNU Emacs a lot, every day---I read my email using Gnus, I track my to-do list and log my work time using Org-mode, I edit all my code and writing in Emacs---but in many ways, I feel like I'm still a raw beginner.

When I watch something like Magnar Sveen's Emacs Rocks videos, I am constantly amazed at the fluidity with which he does things that would take me much longer because I'm not familiar with a lot of capabilities that he's using. And the little snippets of elisp that he uses to simplify things in his What the .emacs.d!? posts blow me away with their ratio of bang for the buck.

In light of all this, I made a conscious decision to start actually studying GNU Emacs in 2013---and then I decided to chronicle my study, in the hopes that it might help others discover new things in GNU Emacs. When I remembered the Do you even Lift? meme, well, naming things is always the hardest but most important part.

So, the plan is for a post a day. The subjects will probably start out utterly mundane and basic---"Hey, did you know there's a keystroke for that?" sort of stuff---but I hope that, over time, they may come to be more complex and sophisticated---less a chronicle of my own personal journey and more a contribution to the store of knowledge about ways to use Emacs most effectively.