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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Of course, the funny part is that ELisp is generally considered to be the least elegant of the big 3 Lisps. CL and Scheme are actually a lot nicer.

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That's the thing with lisps, you can write your own elegance.

You can write your own elegance in any Turing Complete language. Doesn't mean it'll be easy or pleasant. Beware the Turing tarpit and all that...

It's physically possible to dig a mountain with a spoon too. Lisps aren't about the possibility, but about a culture built on top of a thin set of computation/linguistic building blocks and abstractions they allow.

I consider scheme the nicest but the only thing I'd write in it are exercises for a CS textbook. I like CL, but I wouldn't configure my text editor in it.

Elisp gets undue hate.

Scheme is actually usable for Real Work right now. But while Scheme's ecosystem is more active AFAICT, CL's ecosystem and tooling is far more developed.

>I like CL, but I wouldn't configure my text editor in it.

Why not? As Dynamic Scoping falls out of popularity and the cl packages become increasingly widely used, idiomatic elisp becomes increasingly close to CL, despite RMS's distaste for that language.

One Emacs Lisp aspect that I enjoy for interactive configuration is the lack of packages. When interactive programming with some other languages, there's some cognitive overhead "which package am I in?" depending on how you use the user/repl packages and scratch buffers. Without packages, everything is unambiguous and avoids the issue entirely.

re: dynamic scope, I agree that Emacs' future is with lexical-binding for non-special variables. Chris Wellons recently wrote a great post which has shown up on my radar: http://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/12/22/

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