Bamboozled by elisp

Oct 8, 2024

I've been using Emacs for nearly 20 years now, but I still suck at writing elisp. I've never made an effort to learn it seriously and that's something I'd like to start correcting in the near future. I have some ideas. I have an ever-growing collection of scripts I use at work to make several minor tasks less painful, mostly having to do with checking on various AWS resources and updating entries in AirTable. Can I learn enough elisp to move these tools into Emacs, maybe leveraging tabulated-list-mode and/or transient? Who knows. The scripts will probably stay for a while but this could be a fun exercise.

I have a hard time navigating the documentation. I don't have much to complain about - the only specific complaint I have is that it sorely lacks examples - but it just doesn't feel like a good place to hang around. I don't know, it just feels old? The terminology is strange and foreign to me (even after 20 years of Emacs), and basic functions feel underpowered and limited. For example just today I learned about pcase. It is actually a very powerful construct; you can even use it to destructure forms. But I really wish you could destructure objects instead (so I could deconstruct an alist, for example). This is one of the many examples that make me wish I was writing something more modern and cohesive like Clojure.

Of course there are certainly packages that provide structures with better ergonomics but to be honest I don't even know where to look. Like other Lisps, Elisp is extremely extensible but also like other Lisps it suffers from a certain degree of fragmentation, and perhaps due to its age there's likely a reluctance to "modernize" things when there's so much history behind it. At any rate, there's a lot of nice modern packages around (I've been using kubel as inspiration for my AWS exercise) so even if the documentation is uncomfortable to me there's plenty of source code to read. Hopefully I'll be able to move my little projects forward and learn some more of the editor I've been using for most of my life on the way.