cl-lib.el is not discouraged, it's widely used by Emacs itself and pretty much every substantial Emacs Lisp library out there.
What's discouraged is using an older version, cl.el, at runtime [1] because it replaces existing Emacs Lisp functions and pollutes the namespace. Even that's ok to use at compile time though.
Lastly, cl-lib.el is not cumbersome to use.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/cl/Organ...
cl-lib is cumbersome to use, especially since the CL operators now have a different prefix (since Emacs Lisp has no packages). This means I can not use any existing CL code in GNU Emacs - the operators are partially there, but all renamed.
That's cumbersome.
Emacs is good for Lisp development, but both “raw” Emacs itself and most of the packaged customization versions (Spacemacs, etc) are fairly ‘opinionated’ about Lisp, and that opinion usually falls close to: Lisp is great, but Common Lisp is a little/some/much too much, so our choices often lean away from CL’s. (Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2, dynamic vs. lexical scope, etc.) This means that you’re customizing in a nearby language, but one that dislikes some of the things that you liked when you chose CL, so there’s some impedance mismatch going on. That said, you can get a great CL dev environment from Emacs, but you’ll want to install a bunch of add-ons first, probably including a non-Emacs lisp interpreter and a package to bridge Emacs and that other lisp. True fans of CL would really like a full-blown Emacs with real CL at its core, and periodically people try to make those (Hemlock, etc), but they usually don’t catch on.
Emacs Lisp is a Lisp-2.
Emacs Lisp has lexical scope.
When writing code in Emacs, Emacs Lisp for all intents and purposes can be seen as a subset of Common Lisp, not an entirely different language like you present it to be.
Please try not to propagate this sort of misinformation again in the future. The things you claim are obviously wrong to anyone who has ever used Emacs Lisp, even once. Have you ever done that?
In Common Lisp a subset would mean that all programs of that subset would run unchanged in a full CL implementation. Emacs Lisp isn't like that.
More tragically, over time, Emacs Lisp implemented Common Lisp features - even though Richard Stallman does not like Common Lisp's features like keyword arguments - but not in a source compatible way. Emacs Lisp got CL features and operators via libraries, often with incompatible naming, but still can't be programmed in straight Common Lisp.
There's an additional concern. As Lisp users ourselves, we remember how the CL culture was gutted by the wave of nastiness that rolled into it about 15 years ago. No trace of that is ok on Hacker News. Dismayingly, your comments have contained traces of it in the past as well as in this thread.
In fact, you have posted so many uncivil comments to HN already that we're going to ban you if you keep doing it. If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart from now on, we'd greatly appreciate it. This means erring on the side of respecting others, assuming good faith, and providing correct information to teach readers rather than humiliate fellow commenters.
You might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of this site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
Maybe a few, but not full neither even so many. Thanks for pointing about cl vs cl-lib.