this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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How rewarding learning Elisp can be? (alien.top)
submitted 10 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] 2 points 9 months ago

Let me cite RMS to answer that:

The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.

source: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html

Programming in elisp is fun, too. Since it's (typical for Lisp!) interactive programming features.