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Emacs pinky is a function of keybindings, which are yours to rebind. Evil and modal editing are quite popular across the Styx.

Elisp is just a product of its time (and Stallman's dogmatism). The lack of namespacing, lexical scoping (until recently) and first class concurrency really show its age. Nothing like the UI locking up because some function is blocking in the background.

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I’ve done quite a bit of Elisp hacking and concurrency is really the only annoying part for me. I haven’t run into any issues with namespacing and dynamic scoping.

I usually toss a few modern libs in there like dash, s, f, and cl, and it feels like any other modern lisp at that point.

Dynamic scoping is only a problem because nearly everything is lexically scoped these days so it comes as a surprise. In an environment designed to give users the power to customize everything regardless of if the original plugin designer thought they should be able to or not, dynamic scoping is incredibly powerful.

Agree, an Emacs-like environment might be the only place where dynamic scoping makes ergonomic sense. Sometimes I get actively annoyed when something in Emacs isn’t dynamically scoped because it impedes my ability to get stuff done.

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