Subject: bug#41904: Emacs Lisp

From: Arthur Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 08:31:37 +0200

Andrew Goh via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text
editors" <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi GNU Team,
>
> I gather that Emacs Lisp is closest to the original Lisp language.  While the other dialects are different, such as Common Lisp, Racket, Scheme, and Clojure.  
>
> Wonder if there is more documentation available than just this guide which I downloaded as a PDF resource: "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp 3rd Edition".
>  
>
> Secondly, I will probably have to learn Clojure too if Emacs Lisp is not "enhanced" to become a full Lisp language that can generate programs with concurrency features
> on all its platforms - Unix, Linux, MacOS and Windows.
>
> Well, that will be it.
>
> Regards,
>
> Andrew Goh S M
The guide you downloaded is probably the best one, but there are
numerous blogs and smaller guides/articles etc, for example:
http://www.mitchellsoftwareengineering.com/ProgrammingWithGNUEmacsLisp.pdf
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/computing/programming/LISP/Writing%20GNU%20Emacs%20Extensions%20-%20Bob%20Glickstein.pdf
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6771

Just do a web search. Emacs Reddit is good place to ask questions too.

What is a "full" Lisp language?

First you say Emacs Lisp is closest to "original" Lisp (whatever it is)
and then you find Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme etc to be "different". If
Emacs becomes "full Lisp" according to your definition whatever it is,
would it also become "different" as CL, Clojure etc?

Why do you want to learn Emacs Lisp? If you are into writing Emacs
applications then Elisp is your best friend.

If you want to use Lisp as a general programming language to write your
programms in, then you should probably learn Common Lisp and use some
good compiler like SBCL.

Just my personal opinion ...