[ajarmst]

You're postulating a population that are willing to take on the cognitive burden of learning Emacs but who are unwilling to do the same for ELisp. I think that's a smallish population, almost entirely composed of people who want a Scheme, probably Guile, instead (but, like me, are plugging along in Elisp in anticipation of Emacs-Guile potentially shipping before the Rapture). People who want to script in Go, Common Lisp, Javascript, C, Fortran or the Power of Christ are currently pretty much entirely confined to the immediate teams working on those various projects. More power to them, no one who loves Emacs should ever tell anyone 'no, that's not appropriate for Emacs' (I think we established a pretty long time ago that weird esoteric projects out of left field are basically Emacs' wheelhouse, and often turn into really important sub-projects). But, I'm not interested, and I don't know any regular users of Emacs who would be.

[kazinator]

I've actually met many programmers who used Emacs but knew zero Lisp of any kind, including Emacs Lisp. They were just happy using the available goods without looking under the hood.

I don't think it's that unusual. Emacs is quite popular. If even 25% of the user base coded in Lisp, it would be ... astonishing.

[ajarmst]

Absolutely. But I think that, when those programmers do decide "hey, now I want to write some custom code for Emacs", they don't then think "but not in Elisp".

[disgruntledphd2]

It's pretty easy to get started coding in elisp. You essentially start doing it every time you use any command, so there's a mapping from a manual change to scripting it.

Source: am Emacs user, have a few (not a lot) functions that I cobbled together from things I did all the time.