this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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How rewarding learning Elisp can be? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm a new emacs user and I've been using doom emacs for a while now and i'm willing to learn Elisp, but found out that it might not be as easy as it might seem at first, because as i found out, lisp is quite different from other programming languages that i'm used to, especially knowing that i'm not a programmer by any means and my programming knowledge is very little, not mentioning that elisp is pretty old so the learning resources might not be as much as other more popular programming languages

so my question is, Is it worth it?

like what is the level of mastery do i need to achieve to start implementing custom elisp in my configs to enhance my emacs experience?

and how exactly can i improve my emacs experience if i learned elisp?

in other words, how rewarding it would be

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Lisp and Scheme are marvelous 60s-70s hippie acid-head languages. "Hey, let's use a small set of primitives and treat code and data the same and we can run huge worlds with a tiny, recursive interpreter!"

By the time you get to Emacs though, many huge worlds have been built, and navigating the huge world(s) that small set of primitives has created can be..uh..daunting -- both because of 1000s of people's contributions and because of the weight of history (e.g. booleans are "predicates" -- from calculus -- thus all the "_p" names).

That said, at it's core, it's elegant and lovely.

https://preview.redd.it/g641rtwx502c1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1d6fe005a93830eb624d5fd0324ae97c84135f86