Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kazinator 3289 days ago
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.
2 comments
ajarmst 3289 days ago
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".
link
disgruntledphd2 3289 days ago
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.

link