A recurrent theme here at Irreal is that Emacs is for everyone, not just programmers. Every time I find an example of this I try to write about it. It’s a point that Protesilaos Stavrou made in his recent FOSS @ Oxford talk.
Now, in a lovely piece of serendipity, we have Randy Ridenour providing a real world example. Ridenour is a Philosophy professor and, as he himself says, is by no means a programmer. Still, as Prot suggested, he has learned enough to automate some of his Emacs tasks. He started by copying other people’s code but tried to understand what it did.
Now he needs to convert quiz questions from one format to another for the learning management system that his university uses—see his post for the details. This amounts to running a series of regular expression replacements, which he did by hand for a while. Then he realized—as I always find myself doing—that he could just write a bit of Elisp to automate the process.
Ridenour isn’t a programmer and he isn’t a young turk who grew up with all this technology. He’s old enough to have a married daughter so while he may or may not qualify for the Irreal Geezer Club, he is obviously well along in his career. And yet he finds it easy to learn enough Elisp to reduce the friction in his workflow. His colleagues are probably still grumbling about how hard it is to deal with the quizzes but he’s turned all those problems over to Emacs.