(plist-get (cdr (assoc “tsn” org-publish-project-alist)) :base-directory)

So not significantly harder than your example, but with one list per project instead of five.

I was pretty sure I was missing something about the flat list. I noticed property lists in the Elisp documentation but apparently need to pay more attention.

The nonstandard indentation comes mostly from having written more Lisp than read it. My real world peers are fantastic but shy away from Lisp. So if I’m going to learn it I’m just going to have to write some. Pretty soon I’ll post some Elisp to generate the sieve of Eratosthenes; this was my revelation that tail calls in Elisp chew the stack away.

The other reason for the pedantic indentation was to be explicitly clear about where the expressions are. It helped me quite a bit and I like Lisp. The hope was for any fencesitters to take a closer look, compare and contrast with the Ruby code, and maybe hopefully warm to Lisp a little.

I appreciate the helpful, insightful, and civil comment!

Any particular reason you’re using nonstandard indentation? It’s almost never a good idea to use lines exclusively for opening or closing parentheses – yeah, lots of other languages do it, and I’m sure it’s habitual for lots of programmers, but it’s unneeded in Lisp and generally only serves to add visual complexity. For the most part, you should be relying on indentation to read where things begin and end.

That said, it’s good to see someone delving into Lisp and learning why it does things the way it does, rather than dismissing it when it happens to behave unexpectedly.