Great! This could serve as an easy introduction for users new to Elisp.
But I still wish the emacs community could adopt a modern data structure library. It's difficult to consolidate usage of sequences (lists/vectors) with alists and plists. This would make it so much more accessible.
Or the official tutorial: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eintr.ht... (which to be clear I haven't read, but have heard nice things about).
Of all the things for which emacs can be criticised, documentation rigor is really not one.
And this is despite the fact that Emacs Lisp routinely flouts every single software engineering "best practice". The language is dynamically scoped by default! It simply doesn't have namespaces! Static types? Hah! (And I, an inveterate Haskeller, don't even miss them.) You can—and people routinely do—hook directly into all sorts of implementation details from other parts of the codebase.
And yet it just works. And it works remarkably well.
My theory: what matters isn't "best practices", it's have a coherent conceptual design and code that reflects that design. Emacs is designed around a small but expressive set of core concepts that it uses in a consistent manner. Text with properties, buffers, modes, commands, customization variables... Almost everything more complex in Emacs is structured out of these (+ a handful more), and, once you've internalized them, it's surprisingly easy to both learn new higher-level tools and to write your own.
The design of both the user interface and the code directly reflect these concepts which gives us a naturally close connection between the UI and the code (it's almost trivial to jump from an interaction to the code that powers it), makes both UI and code units effortlessly composable and generally makes it easier to understand what's going on and how we can change it.
Still, another manual written from a different perspective probably won’t hurt anything.
Just because something has a >0 level of success doesn't mean there are no negatives. "Best practices don't matter because Emacs Lisp doesn't follow them and it just works" isn't a valid argument: it could very well be that Emacs (Lisp) would shine fifteen-fold brighter if it did also follow those practices. It just happens that having those elements you mentioned as positives are enough to keep the train going in spite of the shortcomings.
I use Emacs and program in Emacs Lisp to scratch my itches, and I agree that there are elements that make it work and hey, I'm still here, but I will bet good money that a parallel universe with Emacs Lisp', Now With Namespaces would work even better.
"Working" isn't binary.
But maybe even more remarkable: he got kicked out of his flat in Greece, couldn't afford a new place, bought a small plot of land in the mountains and started building a hut from materials he was able to afford or from things neighbours gave him. Really the bare minimum (he often sat in his hut with a jacket in winter cause it wasn't well isolated/heated)
Absolutely inspiration, all documented on his YouTube channel https://youtube.com/@protesilaos?si=MnjV7MhKtsT5RDSM
But based on my holistic experience using Emacs—more than a binary "it works"—I'm convinced that the conceptual design carries most of the weight.
Would namespaces, lexical scoping, etc be better? Almost definitely. But it would be a marginal improvement, a difference in degree not kind. Other "best practices" like more aggressive information hiding would go against Emacs's design and make it worse as a whole.
Most "best practices" are neither necessary nor sufficient and, in most cases, not even particularly effective, even when they offer strict improvements over the status quo.
I immediately notice there's seq-filter, which can kill off one of my helper routines. And then (now I'm looking...) I've discovered this was always equivalent to cl-remove-if-not. But I never realised, because of the mystery meat naming conventions.
That's the thing - it probably would not be.
IMO, the key things that allow Emacs to succeed and last, while being somewhat unique in how it "routinely flouts every single software engineering "best practice"", are not merely conceptual, but cultural or even philosophical. The most fundamental of those, IMO, is that Emacs is ultimately owned by users, who are treated as intelligent partners in the relationship. Everything is designed with extensibility in mind. There's no hard boundary between "core developers", "third-party extension developers" and "end-users" - everyone can be any of them, including all three, at any time.
Maximizing extensibility and interoperability, not demanding "users" to coordinate with "developers" and ask for permission, not chasing user growth (it's all Free Software), expecting that everyone is a responsible adult, encouraging users to make Emacs "their own" - all that leads to an approach that goes the opposite to standard software development practice, because the standard practice is built around entirely opposite assumptions.
I also enjoy watching his videos where he talks about various philosophical topics from a very clear, pragmatic and down-to-earth perspective. My impression is that he is a really kind and humble person and that he lives by his philosophical insights, without bragging about his lifestyle or judging about how other people live their lifes.
Usually tools to alleviate working with dumbass web-based (supposedly needing the corporate-approved browser) stuff for $DAY-JOB.
Oh, and an extension to allow emacs-w3m to handle lynx-style multibookmarks.
This sparks my interest as I am in the early days of both customizing Emacs and attempting to displace some of my browsing with it as well. Could you elaborate further on this multibookmarks concept and perhaps an example of one of those alleviations for working with web-based workflows?