Fate_sc over at the Emacs subreddit asks if he should bother to learn Elisp. He’s fairly new to Emacs and is willing to learn Elisp but wonders if it would be worth his while. You see this type of question a lot.
One of Fate_sc’s concerns is that Elisp is “not like” other programming languages and is therefore hard to learn. It’s true that Lisps are different from most other languages but that’s actually a good thing. It’s good because the language has virtually no syntax and is easy to learn. What does make it difficult is the huge run time library. There are hundreds of functions performing all sorts of tasks and in Lisp virtually all actions are realized through functions.
The thing is, though, you don’t have to learn the entire library to be productive. As I’ve said previously, even after more than 15 years I still don’t know all—or even a majority—of the available functions. But as with learning Org, there’s no need to master the whole library to be productive. You can, as Mike Zamansky is currently demonstrating over at C’est La Z, program significant functionality with just a little Emacs. In short, it’s a long journey but one in which you can be highly productive along the way.
The commenters to Fate_sc’s post all agree that it is worthwhile but that each user has to decide for themselves what level of mastery is appropriate for their needs. And it is, as I say, a lot like learning Org: you first learn just enough to make some simple configurations, then a simple editing function, and, then before you know it, you’ll be able to add significant functionality to your Emacs.
Update : Added link to the reddit post.