Today I printed out parts of the Emacs lisp manual, well actually it's the "Introduction the Emacs Lisp", and formally begun the reading. In the past I spent little too much time hacking Emacs lisp. I know Lisp enough to be dangerous, but to do more serious things in Emacs I need to have a firmer foundation. Plus, reading the manual is more fun than trying to puzzle out some code.

I already learned few useful things from the early chapters (eg. the difference between interactive and non-interactive functions).

I have two reasons for doing this. First, at work I'm the office Emacs "guru" - so I really need to be able to do little more than rebind people's keys. Especially, I'm struggling with JDE and JDEbug packages, which I'd like to use, but I'm having trouble setting them up.

Second, I'd like to see a much expanded Emacs mode for SmallEiffel. In particular a nice debugger interface would be cool. So, I want to work on extending current Eiffel mode .

And I guess doing some coding in Lisp is good exercise for the brain - kind of like doing a 10K run.