# Emacs Lisp

30 Hacker News commenters recommended Emacs Lisp and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 34 years (4 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free Lisp built into Emacs, praised for easy debugging, polish and decades of editor use; critics find it verbose and dated.

## Why people recommend it

- Extends Emacs and everything in it (6 comments): "the thing that makes elisp so nice is that it has decades of use to iterate on an editor" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280236)) "I learned “real” programming in the early 90’s by learning Elisp to customize Emacs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030668)) "Everything else is in ELisp, and can be manipulated to your heart's content" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281319))
- Live evaluation and easy debugging (2 comments): "how flexible elisp is to evaluate and poke and prod around with and how easy it is to debug" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533891)) "The runtime is really well integrated in Emacs!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705375))
- Fun, poetic Lisp style (5 comments): "Lisp is poetic and if you've never learned one, you should!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300500)) "Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588271)) "I found it fun, well-documented, and powerful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318855))
- Practical for scripting and tools (4 comments): "spending the (fun!) time writing my first harness in Emacs Lisp" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49144415)) "A little bit of Emacs Lisp turns it into a blogging engine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49938379)) "Elisp is more practical as a scripting language than CL" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328556))

## What people warn about

- Widely disliked by critics (6 comments): "Elisp is a dogshit language with abysmal performance, dynamic scope, mutable state everywhere, spicy hidden side effects, and a single niche implementation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593740)) "It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used, unless at the uttermost end of need." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591278)) "It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593492))
- Verbose, confusing and not intuitive (3 comments): "insufferable verbosity of EMACS Lisp that the insufferably verbose Stallman loved" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027157)) "Elisp is an absolute opposite of being easy and intuitive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45961092)) "for me, Lisp an out, outdated and confusing thing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48856252))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend
- [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend
- [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend
- [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend
- [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Emacs Lisp", https://hackerapproved.com/p/emacs-lisp/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).