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

Elisp isn’t just a programming language it’s an execution environment and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to consider them separately.

For example the largest abstraction in elisp is the buffer. A lot of core language features revolve around and are greatly modified by the buffer. For example variable bindings can typically be overrides in buffer-local variables.

Furthermore there’s a lot of editor specifics that are interesting. Text properties are the least of which. Buffer narrowing is another. But what about… fields? Judicious use of fields limits where you can type into a buffer. Consider the customize user interface for example.

Basically emacs is a complete tui development environment.

If you’re sold on sticking with Emacs, then learning elisp will unquestionably pay dividends, and the more you learn the more you’ll be able to do (but you don’t need to understand everything in order to do anything).

and how exactly can i improve my emacs experience if i learned elisp?

That’s the thing – it’s up to you. The ability to “scratch any itch” is what elisp give you. That doesn’t mean any given thing is easy to do (although it might be) but, to a significant extent, if you can identify a problem then implementing a solution is also a possibility.

Yes. It’s worth it.

If you’ve ever tweaked your Doom config, you’re already writing elisp. Going from setting options to writing new modes will certainly take time, but lisp is a language that builds on itself.

In fact, Emacs+elisp is one of the best systems for learning by doing. C-h f, C-h v, C-x C-e, etc will get you far. The built in tutorial is absolutely worth going thru, and understanding lisp will improve your understanding of other languages as well.

so my question is, Is it worth it?

It’s worth more than a bunch of other people’s opinions.

“i’m not a programmer by any means” what do you use Emacs for? (sincere question, I know non-programers use Emacs)

Actually learning elips itself is the reward.

It’s sort of a silly question.

To customise emacs beyond clicking around in ‘customise’ you need to write elisp. If you learn little elisp then you can only customise it using other people’s code, if you learn a lot of it then you can write an mua.

You decide where you want to be on that spectrum.

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.

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.

It’s pretty tiny compared to a lot of languages considering that most of what you use it for is working with Emacs, which has a small number of intrinsic types like buffers, windows, frames, text properties etc.

Compared to being the kind of person who reads use-package like JSON and treats it like a declaration language, you will be light years ahead at configuration if you just know lists, quoting, alists, plists, and writing functions. Users who don’t go at least that far will be constantly shooting themselves in the foot and spending much more time with minor, novice level bugs that are completely obvious.

In my experience, you don’t really need to know much elisp (if any) to be able to configure your editor unless you’re building your own plugin. Once you have a specific problem, you just Google and use Emacs internal docs.

That said, elisp has an interesting trait: variables are dynamic by default. It’s quite different from other languages so it may be amusing to learn more about (if you do find that interesting, check out PicoLisp)

I’ll start from the last question, to me, if you don’t use elisp, don’t use emacs. To me this is why I still use it, because there is a lisp machine running under it and everything can be manipulated and configured with elisp. Otherwise there are probably better editors these days. You can obviously use it without elisp, if there’s a library or mode that you love and (thanks to the power of elisp) have not found elsewhere, but even that is limited, since you need elisp to configure and manipulate it to fit your use-case the best. And to be honest, copy-pasting stuff without understanding will take you so far and you won’t know why things don’t work when they do, like with every programming language.

But is lisp worth learning? A definitive yes. As you found out, it’s a different animal. Not just the syntax, but the way everything works. It requires you to think differently. I often say that learning new languages mean “how does if/else work, how does for/while works” basically figure out how do all the regular tools for logic and flow control look like in that language and your mostly set, only lisp does not have those “regular tools for logic and flow control”. And on top of that, it’s based on a wholly different paradigm than what the other languages are based on. It’s a hefty task to climb and you must climb it if you want to get to the stuff that is important, like writing stuff that you can run and get results from, and that’s before we get to the real insane stuff, the true homoiconicity (here’s another word for you) of lisp, the idea that code is data is code, which is truly rare in computing (despite what some fans of other languages will tell you, there are only 2-3 actual homoiconic programming languages and lisp is the most commonly used of them all) and is very hard to wrap your head around.

So is it worth it? yes, for two reasons. Learning languages that use different paradigms always improves your abilities since you now have more ways of thinking about stuff. Learning Erlang made me a better Javascript programmer just because Erlang has a different way of thinking about everything that C languages take for granted.

Second, learning lisp in particular will improve you as a programmer. I don’t know why exactly (Not a CS theoretician), but I believe it has to do with the way computers actually “think”. Lisp, as its many detractors will say, is written in a way that is closely connected with the way a computer runs a program, after it’s been disassembled away all the niceties of syntax and suchlike, but before its been interpreted down to assembly. It’s the closest you get to programming in AST trees (another word for you) without actually doing that (and without going insane). Once you climb that mountain you will, guaranteed, be a better programmer, just because you will have better understanding of how is your code being run (guarantee not guaranteed).

It was for me.

After reading Paul Graham wax lyrical about lisp ( see essay Beating the Averages), I wanted to learn a lisp. Emacs is the most practical lisp in the sense that even a small amount of it can do something immediately useful (for emacs), and I wasn’t going to replace R / Python / Fortran with Common Lisp or Scheme for my scientific computing needs.

Not sure it expanded my mind like I had expected in the end. Apart from the homoiconicity and macros, most major ideas introduced by lisp has made its way into other mainstream languages.

But it’s a beautiful language and at least I know now that I’m not missing out on something huge, and that gives me piece of mind (maybe macros are huge and I’m toying with them in Julia at the moment).

I’m not in love with elisp but I learned enough of it to make emacs do what I want.

I’ll admit without shame that the for complicated stuff, I do it all in python helpers, and I just use elisp to marshall data to and from python.

A better elisp developer than me would do everything in elisp… but I need to get things done quickly and dirty.