Thanks for sharing this. My personal experience speaks to a lot of what the author mentions: I'm an academic with little programming experience to speak of (mainly some Java in high school), and it always seemed to my younger self like there was this insurmountable hurdle between the language-learning phase and the part when you can actually develop useful applications. Now, of course, I know that this is not necessarily true of programming, and that this discouraging feeling is something beginners experience in many fields--but that's how it seemed back then.
Flash forward to now: I picked up Emacs a year or so ago because of Org-mode and its promise of organizing my tasks. Gradually growing my init.el to fit with my way of thinking was my first encounter with programming with any kind of direct practical application, since (as the author mentions) a beginning user frequently pastes simple Lisp functions off StackExchange, and you can kind of puzzle out how they work with your own eyes, immediately, even if you lack significant training. It soon gave me the goal of using code that I could understand (at least somewhat) when I needed new Emacs functionality, rather than just downloading a big package off MELPA that would be far beyond my comprehension. And that was the point I started to learn Emacs Lisp.
Currently I've been working on a minor mode. Who knows how long it'll take me, but it's been a fun ride, and I credit this personal development to the lack of barriers in Emacs that the author describes.
Flash forward to now: I picked up Emacs a year or so ago because of Org-mode and its promise of organizing my tasks. Gradually growing my init.el to fit with my way of thinking was my first encounter with programming with any kind of direct practical application, since (as the author mentions) a beginning user frequently pastes simple Lisp functions off StackExchange, and you can kind of puzzle out how they work with your own eyes, immediately, even if you lack significant training. It soon gave me the goal of using code that I could understand (at least somewhat) when I needed new Emacs functionality, rather than just downloading a big package off MELPA that would be far beyond my comprehension. And that was the point I started to learn Emacs Lisp.
Currently I've been working on a minor mode. Who knows how long it'll take me, but it's been a fun ride, and I credit this personal development to the lack of barriers in Emacs that the author describes.