If you follow the various Emacs forums, you’ll see a lot a whining about how hard Elisp is to learn and how things would be so much better if only the extension language were something rational like Python, Ruby, or Lua. I rail frequently against this nonsense but Prot (Protesilaos Stavrou) stands as an unassailable refutation of the silliness.
He’s a guy with a liberal arts education who has no training in programming and yet has nevertheless produced some really great Emacs software. If you look at his code, you can see that he’s obviously mastered the intricacies of Elisp.
Now, Prot has shared some of his knowledge in the form of a short Elisp tutorial. Although Emacs is exhaustively documented, there’s a dearth of Elisp documentation for beginners. There is, of course, the Elisp manual, which is comprehensive, but not really beginner friendly. It’s a reference rather than a tutorial.
There’s the builtin Elisp tutorial and Mbork’s Elisp book but not much more. I am, therefore, happy to see Prot’s contribution. I haven’t had a chance to do more than scan it but it seems like a very worthwhile addition to the Emacs corpus.
One thing for sure, it should put all the whiners to shame. If you’re claiming to be a software engineer but find Elisp too difficult to learn, you should be chagrined that a guy with no formal training in software is nevertheless able to produce first rate Elisp code that the Emacs community embraces as useful and excellent.
The irony is that Lisps in general are actually easier to learn and use than other languages. It’s just that they’re unfamiliar to n00bs so they seem unapproachable. If you just suspend your expectations from other languages, you’ll find that Elisp is actually an easy language to learn.
Update : Added link to Prot’s book.