this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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How rewarding learning Elisp can be? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Fate_sc@alien.top to c/emacs
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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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[–] thetemp_@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Lisp (and especially Emacs Lisp) isn't harder than other languages. I'm not a professional programmer either, but I've dabbled in languages from BASIC to bash to PERL, JavaScript, and Python. In my experience, Elisp has been the easiest of all of them.

Once you wrap your head around how lists work in Lisp, it all comes together pretty quickly. And Emacs's self-documenting nature makes learning it that much easier.

The syntax is more consistent than any other language I've come across. It's lists all the way down.

Just do "C-h R eintro RET" and start learning. Do "M-x find-library RET" to read the code of your favorite package and figure out how it works.