I love writing elisp, obviously! It wasn't some drudgery for me, it was the whole reason I even got into coding (from using R in emacs) in the first place.

I got into a habit (obsession?) of automating as much as possible everything I repetitively do on a computer by writing elisp. It's essentially my operating system.

ESS is truly a gateway drug.

> Imagine what you could have accomplished if you didn't have to spend all that time writing an entire large codebase just to make it usable. It's a false assumption that it should require pointless busywork to be useful. You're never getting back the time you've wasted on writing a config for an obsolete editor.

Isn't this precisely the kind of "protestant work ethic" that you mentioned just before? If someone enjoys writing ELisp for Emacs, what's wrong with writing 61k lines of it?