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I have not forgotten my own "beginner's journey" - au contraire - I vividly remember it, and thus I'm sharing an admonition - so people wouldn't waste their time. Because I did. Besides, I have successfully mentored people from zero-to-hero and helped them learn Emacs.

My suggestion to focus on Elisp is not like tech-splaining monads, and Lisp is not that difficult. Definitely not even in the same league of difficulty as Haskell. It is an astoundingly simple language. And yet people just ignore it for years, clueless of what they're missing.

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How did you approach emacs onboarding? In my case it wad sheer enthusiasm of 20 year old who want to do cool things, no matter the amount of effort.

So if it takes learning a language, language it was.

But i gave up on teaching Emacs. My current stance is: if you want emacs then you know how to do it.

> How did you approach emacs onboarding

I'd typically would start by showcasing a single (albeit enormously important) aspect of it, like search. When someone sees the countless ways to search for things in Emacs:

- isearch, query-replace, occur, multi-occur, project-search, find-file (with wildcards), ffap, apropos, xref-find-definitions/find-references, consult-line, consult-ripgrep, consult-fd, consult-hn, consult-omni, browser-hist-search, magit-find-file, magit-dired-log, etc.

That typically, already is enough for them to say - "darn, I want this...". Then next step is to show them that there's nothing to fear - everything is documented, described and can be inspected on the go.

In teams where pair-programming is a normal practice, I would typically watch their efforts with something in VSCode, IntelliJ, or even Vim and ask them if they'd want to see how I'd do the same/similar thing in Emacs. If the person is not interested, I won't push for it, but at that point, someone who worked with me on the same team knows that I can show them something entertaining and interesting to see, even if they don't get the immediate urge to dive into it.