I have had the pleasure  of teaching
a few people  with  and about SDL2 C  Hour  2:  The hour  that  is not but
recently,  particularly  using emacs  could     be    named     unhygienic
orgmode.   Much to my shock as I had  tangle-time macro expansion
been planning a hard pivot  into ECL
common  lisp,  SDL2 C has worked  so  If  you show someone  orgmode  noweb
well there is not really a place for  tangles and they don't already  know
lisp (which  would also jostle emacs  it, they don't  know it after  being
and orgmode in my opinion).           shown either.   But imagine  this as
                                      that sort of Greek tragedy - here is
You  can look  at two  hour-intended  the end, now here's the beginning  -
orgmode   docs,  though  I  need  to  and  it has worked  well.   Get  the
explain   the battle  plan which has  student    to   start  doing   their
gone very well. The printing  themed  creative main method spaghetti, then
fork of the second doc is unused.     help them move their code into named
                                      blocks and replace it with the noweb
Hour 1:  Learning  to refer  to  the  reference.   noweb hopefully  clicks
SDL2 wiki                             here.   Using  unhygenic    variable
                                      capture,   we have reuseability  and
The  secret  emphasis  is on getting  stateful
them  using some high-reward   emacs  pseudo-function-functionality.
key-chords. The SDL2 wiki (like most
wikis,  not a wiki) has a few random  I  have got the feedback  that  they
whole  cloth examples  and more more  can blithely  try any idea because I
meagre examples. What has worked for  can tap a few key chords  to restore
me  is getting  people  to  discover  order  no matter  what  as a  safety
that  they  can copypasta  the  code  blanket,   and somewhat   cheatingly
from  the SDL_RenderClear  wiki page  whatever they want is guaranteed  to
for example, and on the back of this  succeed  quickly and succinctly  for
triumph find and largely borrow some  similar reasons. The latter would be
other    function   examples    like  a problem,  but I have  found myself
SDL_RenderDrawLine.   This backfired  basically unnecessary so far. I have
on me in the sense  that  no one has  had  some success  getting  them  to
really   cared   about  the  obvious  pull themselves  out of the swamp by
mistakes   in  the  SDL2_RenderClear  their own hair through nascent emacs
example  source.   I did find people  wizardry.
going from
not-application-programmers  to  low
level   graphical    C   application
programmers quite satisfying.


In this context it is interesting to
weigh  emacs  + C + orgmode  against
common lisp for myself.  Common lisp
has  everything  the other three  do
inside   it  already   which   goes,
debatably,  for common lisp I think.
If you want  to use lisp,  use lisp,
if  you  want  to use C, use  emacs,
orgmode,  C...  And that's  just the
beginning  of the list. On the other
hand the only way to go as fast as C
in  lisp   is  to realize   C  as  a
dangerously  unlispy domain specific
language  in lisp.  Common  lisp has
pretty  printing,   file io,  reader
macros, introspection, is extensible
using lisp, has fine grained  reader
macro/macroexpansion    time   macro
control similar to emacs/orgmode.