For those of you who are afraid of Lisp—and in particular Elisp—Suraj Kushwah has a short video on Elisp that posits the way to love Emacs is to learn Elisp. I can relate, sort of. I first learned Lisp and then decided to move to Emacs so that I could leverage my Lisp knowledge. It’s worked out well. Kushwah takes the opposite view: if you started with Emacs, you should learn Elisp to learn to love it more.
The video will by no means make you an Elisp master. Its virtue is to show how easy Elisp really is. Like all Lisps, the syntax is trivial. Sure, there’s a couple of corner cases but mostly the difficulty is learning the functions. In that respect, it’s like learning a library—which is what you’re really doing. It’s not syntax, it’s finding out what commands are available.
Kushwah’s video shows how to do just a few things in Elisp and takes the mystery out of it. Mostly, it’s getting used to putting the operator before the operands. Basically, that’s 90% of the syntax. The often despised parentheses become natural once you grok the basic syntax. Paul Graham once described Lisp as forcing the coder to write the syntax graph directly instead of relying on the compiler. That may seem restrictive but once you try it, it turns out to be liberating. Instead of worrying about complex syntax and precedence rules, you simply write what you mean. I’ve reached the point where writing in other languages is chore.
If you’re new to Emacs or Elisp take a look at Kushwah’s video. It won’t make you a master but will give you confidence that Elisp is well within your command.