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

  • WatermellonSugar@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year 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

    • fragbot2@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Not just you and it’s not just /r/emacs or /r/org-mode, I’ve seen them in other places as well. While the guy in /r/org-mode wasn’t one, most of them write so poorly that they must be ESL people and argue about minute things that well-adjusted (genuine?) people wouldn’t argue about.

      The other thing I’m seeing is an increase in duplicated posts to multiple forums asking fragmentary, barely coherent questions. Writing this, I just had the obvious epiphany that my assumption–there’s a person at the other end–might be wrong.

      • github-alphapapa@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Hm, yeah, imagine some kind of service that takes a question from a user and posts it on Reddit, then feeds the answers into its own ML model and gives something back to the user (with a significant delay, obviously, so maybe more for training purposes).

        There was a post here within the past couple of months that, when I looked at its account history, seemed to be obviously some kind of bot, but its writing was coherent enough to seem authentic in isolation.

        Seems like a dark time for the Web is coming. :/