0·
10 months agoIt’s pretty tiny compared to a lot of languages considering that most of what you use it for is working with Emacs, which has a small number of intrinsic types like buffers, windows, frames, text properties etc.
Compared to being the kind of person who reads use-package like JSON and treats it like a declaration language, you will be light years ahead at configuration if you just know lists, quoting, alists, plists, and writing functions. Users who don’t go at least that far will be constantly shooting themselves in the foot and spending much more time with minor, novice level bugs that are completely obvious.
Emacs is a programmable interface to a computer. While it is frequently used to program itself to program other things, it is a foundational bootstrap tool.
IDE’s seek to present a set of features that fills that domain of work. You hit a ceiling in that world. With Emacs, you continue molding it to things you get value out of years and decades later, after that IDE went away when its most popular language or framework went into decline.
In the upcoming landscape of AI’s with more well-defined type interfaces and symbolic representations, tools like Emacs will be at the forefront of composing these tools into the long tail of cottage industries of what will amount to a revolution in IP, programming, and human-computer interfaces.