I'd trade my dog to have Clojure-like maps and destructuring in Elisp. Comparing workflow with maps in Clojure and alist/plist in Elisp won't get any points to Elisp side.
Depends on the result. I do interactive rebases extremely often, I don't have to look up how it works.
Sometimes I have to use some command I'm not familiar with. Sometimes familiar commands gain new options. It's perfectly okay to use some reference for that. Also, "more time" is like 1 minute.
> and modal editing saved my career from an early death by wrist injury
The fun thing is I stopped experiencing wrist pain after I switched from Vim to Emacs (with ±native bindings), partly because I moved Ctrl to Caps almost instantly, partly because I stopped using a lot 3rd party apps (e.g. XMPP/IRC clients) which required mouse.
Oh interesting - the Ctrl caps change was something I picked up when first playing with emacs (before I knew any vim) and it was a game changer for me, even though I was just using mostly native vscode bindings at that time. I used to think even if I didn't end up switching to emacs, it'd always at least have given me that.
But you to have to know where to click. And that's the biggest problem with so-called "modern" UIs - it lacks discoverability. Either you memorize all menus and dialogs, or you have to seek out the functionality you need each time you can't remember anything. And sometimes these dialogs change, so you have to rediscover everything once again.
In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys.
> You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect.
One of the main reasons I moved to Emacs (11 years ago) was Common Lisp and SLIME.
> If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp.
> In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys.
afaik every modern IDE has this discoverability functionality. I use shift-shift and control-control autocomplete command menus all the time in JetBrains.
> but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim.
In Emacs - you don't have, there are a lot of packages which make the discoverability a breeze - counsel-M-x, helm-M-x for exploring all commands with corresponding shortcuts and also which-key, which allows you to automatically pop up the "next steps" in your current state.
How about having a mental capacity to remember all menus/dialog boxes in your IDE?
You don't, there's an MTA for that, but for composing mail, filtering mailbox, searching and other text-related tasks Emacs has much superior interface.
> be an IRC client
Messaging consists mostly of text editing, especially in IRC, which doesn't have fancy stuff like stickers, GIFs, videos.
> What difference does it make what programs do those things, as long as they work well and I can extend the functionality as needed?
A consistent, self-documenting, extendable interface.
