Menno Finlay-Smits has an interesting post on using John Wiegley’s use-package package. It’s a fairly short post but Finlay-Smits makes a good case that the package make Emacs configuration cleaner and easier. As he also points out, it’s easy to arrange to have use-package defer loading of packages until they’re needed. If you’re the type of person who starts and stops Emacs a lot, that’s a win because it makes Emacs load faster. A feature that I really like is the ability to cause the installation of any packages not already present. I have my init.el set up so that I can create my entire Emacs environment just by loading a new Emacs with it. That’s great for moving to new machines.
Finally, although Finlay-Smits doesn’t mention it, another reason that I like use-package is that it’s a wonderful example of an Elisp macro. If you’ve used it, you know that use-package has many options that can operate in complex ways. If you want to see how a complicated macro is built, use-package is a good place to look.