I am either fortunate or unfortunate in not having any Emacs experience. A million lines of LISP these days, really? So, I would have never thought about this approach to bringing accessibility to the desktop.
Although this chapter strongly hinted that the author is blind, I looked it up and he is in fact a blind computer scientist. I can't imagine doing software like this without sight. I often demo a web page reader in my information retrieval course, and the class gets a good sense of how frustratingly difficult it is to do even basic Google searches and assess responses without sight. Although, the previous Stephen Hawking story is completely mind bogglingly unbelievable.
The use of aspects here is an interesting choice. I teach a little aspect-oriented programming, but I have not used the technique myself. I didn't know that this facility exists in LISP (called advice), and I also ran across it in Objective-C (called category, and it can be done at run time).
Although this chapter strongly hinted that the author is blind, I looked it up and he is in fact a blind computer scientist. I can't imagine doing software like this without sight. I often demo a web page reader in my information retrieval course, and the class gets a good sense of how frustratingly difficult it is to do even basic Google searches and assess responses without sight. Although, the previous Stephen Hawking story is completely mind bogglingly unbelievable.
The use of aspects here is an interesting choice. I teach a little aspect-oriented programming, but I have not used the technique myself. I didn't know that this facility exists in LISP (called advice), and I also ran across it in Objective-C (called category, and it can be done at run time).