Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 Minutes (2013)

> I'm assuming the learner is coming from an imperative language background.

Well, Emacs Lisp is pretty imperative: it doesn't optimise tail calls, so loops are often needed; its distinct namespaces/special-forms for functions and "values" (which includes anonymous functions) makes functional style less attractive in some situations; many tasks are achieved through destructive update of (often temporary) buffers; Emacs itself is controlled by mutating dynamic or global variables; etc.

I would say Emacs Lisp is much closer to imperative languages like Python, than it is to syntactically-similar languages like Scheme, for example.

Agreed. In Emacs hacking -- which presumably is what most people would want to use Elisp for -- the syntax is typically not the problem. Knowing how to interact with Emacs' libraries and its way of doing things is much more intricate. At least once you go beyond smaller aux functions and such.

True, and emacs is quite a large thing, with API from IPC to URL, XML, binary parsing, text rendering, non overlapping window management, etc etc. That's from vanilla distribution, then there's user made packages and since it's a lisp ... So RTFM hard, or read existing code hard or harass #emacs hard (non exclusive choices).

The syntax is what scares people off, though.

M-x customize!

Here's a great website: https://www.masteringemacs.org

You're right though, a basic "bootstrap your .emacs" tutorial would be very helpful.

Hardcore vim user seconds this.