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Before I learned lisp, I remember seeing this sentiment expressed a lot and thinking people were underselling the difficulty and overselling the usefulness of "
by jpe90 5y ago
Before I learned lisp, I remember seeing this sentiment expressed a lot and thinking people were underselling the difficulty and overselling the usefulness of "programming your text editor" as opposed to just configuring it via standard options.
After I learned enough Common Lisp to build a few small projects, I realized how powerful it is to write small, bespoke functions for odd text editing jobs. You can write and save functions that do something very specific but powerful to any project you're working on, regardless of the language or tooling used, because everything uses text. I'm so glad I learned it.
- codethief 5y agoI'm glad to hear that because so far my impression agrees with yours (before you learned Lisp) and this comment[0]. Do you happen to know a good tutorial to learn Emacs Lisp? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29256103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29256103
- jpe90 5y agoI learned it from the manual built into Emacs itself, which you can access by entering "C-x r" and then following the link to "Emacs Lisp" near the top. I had literally never heard of Lisp at the time I stumbled on it. But the way that I actually got competent enough to do anything interesting with it was to learn Common Lisp, because they are similar in that learning to solve problems in Common Lisp lets you do the same in Elisp. I learned Common Lisp by reading Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel and writing small programs. I would really recommend spending a little time learning both dialects because it's easy to learn "just enough" elisp to configure your setup but not enough to appreciate what you can do with it.