Saw this post the other day: Emacs is hurting Clojure and this response: Is Emacs Really HJard to Learn / Use. This called to mind those countless discussions about tools being user friendly. I'm frequently on the unpopular side of these discussions. Linux vs Windows vs Mac, Shell vs GUI, Emacs vs fill-in-the-blank-editor-or-IDE and on and on. Don't use Emacs, it isn't user friendly. Don't use Linux, it isn't user friendly.

I only learned about NYCIST last spring. They're the "New York Consortium for Independent School Technologists." They had something of an open house that I attended. I heard about them from friend and fellow CS educator Saber Khan. Last Thursday I spent an afternoon and evening with NYCIST members for a discussion of the state of K12 Computer Science Education in the City. Most of my work has been with public schools and most of the teachers I know, public school teachers so it was great to make new friends in the Independent school community.

I've been meaning to comment on these tweets for a while: I went to high school with some scary smart people. Never made math team. Didn't get into honors math. Thought I wasn't good at it. — Stanislav Nikolov (@snikolov) June 30, 2016 @zamansky :D that's the thing though you can get such an inferiority complex by always comparing yourself to others https://t.co/LvaMjp1WVf — Stanislav Nikolov (@snikolov) July 1, 2016 Stan, of course, is one of the most talented people I know.

The day after Labor Day. The day NYC teachers traditionally return to work. For the first time in a quarter century, I'm not one of them. It's weird. Instead, I'm in the second week of Hunter College's fall semester. So far so good on that front. I'm getting to know my students, planning activities and overall having a good time. But, I do have to reflect on some of the things I'm not going to get to do this week:

We're now a week in to my first class at Hunter. It's a little early for me to really compare and contrast the high school to college experience but I thought I'd share some thoughts on a tool that I've recently started to play with. My students were all supposed to be issued laptops at the beginning of the semester. The plan was to have them learn Linux, the command line, and a little DevOps along the way.

I originally planned on do some videos on C++ development but I'm just not feeling it. Probably because I'm excited to be working with my new class and we're working in Python. We're not going to be using C+++ for a few months so I'll get to those videos a little later. Today, I want to cover what I consider a leatherman or multi-tool for Emacs. Something that isn't perfect for any particular job but can get almost any job done: Macros.

I saw this headline earlier today: The U.S. Just Made a Bold Move to Improve Diversity in Tech. The article talks about a program by which a number of code schools will be able to accept federal student aid. I don't know if we're talking student loans or grants but I'm not sure it matters. The headline sounds great. I'm not so sure that this is a good thing.

Sorry for the incosistancy of the posts. I hope to get to that one video a week soon but I've still got a hectic couple of weeks ahead. No new material this week, or at least very little. This week, I talk about some thoughts on the "Using Emacs" series. In the video I talk about Sacha Chua and her work as a leader in the Emacs community. Check out her stuff here: http://sachachua.

It turns out that Elpy, a popular emacs package for python development is much easier to set up than I remember. It turns out all you need is: (use-package elpy :ensure t :config (elpy-enable)) The video shows how to install and a bit of use. I don't think it's a package I'm going to use much since I use other tools to do similar things but it's worth checking out.

This week, we're going to look at my setup for Python programming. I'm an educator, not a professional developer so I'm not working in huge code bases with dozens or more files at a time. I do periodically work in medium size code bases and will talk about cross file navigation and project management later on. There are also more powerful emacs Python packages. One being elpy. Elpy looks pretty cool but for me, it's overkill.