@jayzawrotny i don't follow what you mean by "With Doom it was immediately clear how to evaluate directly against emacs" -- would you mind elaborating on that a bit? i typically use M-: (eval-expression) or C-x C-e (eval-last-sexp) for emacs lisp -- are those or something like it clearer in doom?

True, I didn't mean to suggest it's specific to Doom. More like because doom is configured by writing elisp code combining macros\functions, the evaluation capabilities and tutorials were surfaced very early on in the getting started experience. I didn't even realize you could do that with Spacemacs.

thanks for the clarification, i think i understand better :)

may be people have seen this already, but fwiw, the hopl iv thing that has rh's clojure history paper appears to have something for emacs lisp: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3386324