> the population of people merely using Emacs and lightly hacking their own setup

This is a good thing. Custom environments should be either minimal or upstream. Anybody should be able to sit down next to you and help you hack out a change. The more unusual/custom your environment is the less productive that is, and this more than balances out any possible gain you can make from custom setups. (don't forget to account for your cost to learn elisp and then make the changes!)

Somebody needs to make the correct setups. However most of us have better things to do.

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TFNA 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not advocating for making all (or even most) users spend so much time on internals that they don't get productivity gains. Rather, I'm concerned about maintaining, ensuring generational turnover, and healthily boosting the elite that the product depends on. It is no secret that a number of Emacs ecosystem core devs are middle-aged, and so the project is a few heart attacks or whatever away from losing the experience and competence that has sustained it so well.

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skydhash 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Most of emacs is lisp. The actual C part is quite small considering the capabilities of the system. Lisp being what it is, it’s moslty about domain knowledge than language expertise.

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jupitr 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel the lisp constructed on top needs significant language expertise. Lispy constructs of defvar, defconst, defcustom, alist, cl-loop etc. are quite extensively used in emacs - and need an understanding quite unique to Lisp. Of course, the domain then builds on top of this shared understanding of the contructs themselves.

I would say that loss of expertise in emacs-lisp is a significant loss, even if there continues to exist C-expertise globally.

	▲	skydhash 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's a wealth of packages and the documentation for emacs-lisp is quite extensive. It's not some esoteric language. But what I'm talking about is that the code for the packages can be quite simple and readable.