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 SuLinab@alien.top to c/emacs
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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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[–] erez@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I understand correctly, you are asking why is documentation using bad code examples that are not explanatory and/or usable?

If so, then I believe we can exonerate the emacs community from this issue as this is an industry-wide problem. I recall trying to figure out what a .NET class do from the generic unusable examples given in MS code, and more recently trying to divine meaning from the almost usable but never truly so code examples in Angular documentation. And you'll see that everywhere. I got used to ignore documentation and just read the code. Tests sometimes help as they are actual programs that use the stuff in question, but it does seem like writing good, usable documentation is an art form no one bothered to master. Or even apprentice in.

There's a reason to that, code examples are written by people who are experts in the technology they are documenting. They have no way of knowing what is needed for someone new to understand in order to use it, so they default on writing the most basic code example they can come up with. It's a known issue and you eventually learn to live with it.

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.

[–] SuLinab@alien.top 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.

[–] erez@alien.top 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.