this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Why the journey of learning Emacs and Elisp in 2023 is so hard ? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hey there.

I'm a fan of Emacs, like you folks.

I use Emacs org every day, mainly for my teaching class. Furthermore, I learn Emacs for three years ago.

But I struggle to achieve my learning of Elisp. For example, taping lisp and elisp code with evil/lispy is a true nightmare (I use Prelude with few modes, btw), not to mention when I type code block within org.

I knew the learning curve is hard. But I didn't expect that much frustration to learn it. The documentation is austere. So few examples are given. There is too little blogs or books about Emacs, specifically about org and babel.

To illustrate my point, let's take the «*this*» kind-of macro in babel, that I found TODAY by CHANCE in this page : https://orgmode.org/manual/Results-of-Evaluation.html.

It's a game changer for a lot of my code, and would deserve a whole page to illustrate it. But no, it's given in a «niche» example.

Don't be mistaken, I found Babel/Org/Emacs wonderful, but what a pain in the ass to learn it !

For such an old and wise piece of software, I can't understand why we don't have a smooth learning experience with Emacs. A lot of people could benefit Org/Emacs, without the big hinder of the «lack» of documentation (mostly examples).

Am I the only one to experience this ?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, don't bother complaining. You are getting this great tool (either emacs or Org-Mode) free and due to the great effort of its writers and maintainers (and I am always amazed at the scope of things that were created this way, it's truly something to be proud of), so be thankful that it actually has documentation and besides, if you don't like something, fix it and send them the patch, don't complain! I mean, you won't get to write that patch because you can't understand the program due to its documentation, but hey, who said life is fair.

I’m eternally in debt with people who made Emacs possible. Emacs taught me how to think, show me the «literate programming» that I love so much. This is why I’m currently frustrating.

But, you are totally right. Thanks for this important reminder that we have such a great tool for free, and with such freedom.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm aiming at both sides. I have used a library in work that had a utf8 issue, and started digging through the issues on GitHub, only to find that each such issue was flagged as "wont fix" and the reason was 'no activity on this issue for X amount of time". Which is a tactic I would get fired for had I tried it. I pointed this out and immediately got "we-hell, Pull Requests are welcome". Which is rather not helping. Also, turns out it's a matter with a dependency of that library, which you only found if you went through each issue. But then again, that guy was publishing that library out of the goodness of his heart, so you can only bitch up to a certain point. It's kinda odd because that bug caused me to waste a day and that meant I wasted my employer's money on the issue. So this "labour of love" and voluntary effort can cost people money due to the "I'm not getting paid to do this" attitude sometimes involved with the project. IT is a double edged sword.