lisp goated

Which Lisp variety? Like, Common Lisp with its few implementations has its own merits (in tooling and all that) and various Scheme implementations have their own merits, besides language philosophies. Racket has its merits compared to erm “main Scheme branch”. There are many esoteric-looking lisps out there too.

(Disclaimer: I just have a few CL/Scheme-versed friends and don’t use them myself despite their several attempts to encourage that; also I read a bit about Racket’s cool things because of Alexis King’s blog.)

@degtorad Probably racket or clojure?

@Alana Oh, thanks, this changes the prediction then a bit!

A lot of the historical hype around Lisp is from back when the alternative was C. It's a cool language, but things like dynamic typing and first class functions and garbage collection are so common now the only thing that really sets it apart is that it has a macro system that doesn't suck.

I think it's probably not worth learning except as a curiosity or if you have an interest in metaprogramming.

Worth it if you want to use emacs as an editor. It's a great language but not very practical nowadays

@egroj I’m also open to being convinced to switch to Emacs/SpaceMacs. I currently use VSCode with Vim bindings, and I don’t love it.

@Alana s/SpaceMacs/Spacemacs

@Alana emacs is the best, but it has a very steep learning curve. I think that the best way to learn it is to use it as youreditor for a new project with a programming language that you are just learning. If you have a project that you want to do in lisp you could do both

@egroj unclear if I magically became the top 1% of Emacs users right now, how much more effective it would make me at programming

@Alana quite a lot, you would def become much faster (write more code with less keystrokes and barely touching the mouse). However, the investment that you have to do to modify emacs for the best set up depends on the language. For example, if you use git, I would estimate that no matter your current profficiency in just a week of getting used to magit (emacs mode for git) you would be at least 30% more efficient each time that you use git. This is not programming, but I estimate that my setup for handling emails in gnus (one of emacs modes for news/emails) makes me about 40% more efficient with emails, but I doubt that anyone could get to similar set up and profiency for themselves (there's a lot of elisp coding involved) before a year of heavy use and set up. If you are already very proficient with a language in another editor, switching to emacs would def slow you down. You would be able to eventually do 99% of the things that you were doing with the other editor in emacs at least as fast (60% of things faster), but there could be weeks, months or years before you get there.

@egroj This is actually convincing

@Alana recommend doom emacs over spacemacs if long startup times (multiple seconds) bother you. Was going to say that doom emacs is faster in general, but honestly don't remember all the reasons that made me switch.

@Tassilo I prefer regular emacs cloned from the official repo (http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs). In case anyone is interested:

git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git
cd emacs
./autogen.sh
./configure
make

then the executable file is emacs/src/emacs (or do make install if you have root access).

To update you just 'git pull' from the git repo and 'make' again (or 'make bootstrap' if you haven't updated in a while)