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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.

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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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