Emacs Lisp
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 54 of 163 programming languages by recommenders
Free Lisp built into Emacs, praised for easy debugging, polish and decades of editor use; critics find it verbose and dated.
Free Lisp built into Emacs, praised for easy debugging, polish and decades of editor use; critics find it verbose and dated.
40 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 30
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 75%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 34 years
Median of the 4 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it carries the badge
- 30 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Extends Emacs and everything in it
“the thing that makes elisp so nice is that it has decades of use to iterate on an editor”
Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Emacs Turns 50” “I learned “real” programming in the early 90’s by learning Elisp to customize Emacs.”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “Emacs Is a Lispboard” “Everything else is in ELisp, and can be manipulated to your heart's content”
Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Emacs Turns 50” - Comment from 17 Nov 2025 in “IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs”
- Comment from 2 Oct 2026 in “Blogging with Gleam, Org-Mode and Pandoc”
- Comment from 18 Jul 2026 in “A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp”
Live evaluation and easy debugging
“how flexible elisp is to evaluate and poke and prod around with and how easy it is to debug”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Fine, I'll build my own text editor” “The runtime is really well integrated in Emacs!”
Comment from 14 Sep 2026 in “NEO Emacs – GPU-Accelerated Emacs Powered by Rust” Fun, poetic Lisp style
“Lisp is poetic and if you've never learned one, you should!”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: Last time you wrote code?” “Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp.”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “Emacs, how it all started (for me)” “I found it fun, well-documented, and powerful.”
Comment from 10 Mar 2026 in “Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packages, and a Full Refactor” - Comment from 14 Aug 2026 in “Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros”
- Comment from 18 May 2026 in “Hyperpolyglot Lisp: Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure, Emacs Lisp”
Practical for scripting and tools
“spending the (fun!) time writing my first harness in Emacs Lisp”
Comment from 2 Aug 2026 in “Cursor removed cost information from the usage page and CSV export” “A little bit of Emacs Lisp turns it into a blogging engine.”
Comment from 2 Oct 2026 in “Blogging with Gleam, Org-Mode and Pandoc” “Elisp is more practical as a scripting language than CL”
Comment from 10 Mar 2026 in “Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packages, and a Full Refactor” - Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Emacs, how it all started (for me)”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Widely disliked by critics
“Elisp is a dogshit language with abysmal performance, dynamic scope, mutable state everywhere, spicy hidden side effects, and a single niche implementation.”
Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Emacs, how it all started (for me)” “It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used, unless at the uttermost end of need.”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “Emacs, how it all started (for me)” “It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used”
Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Emacs, how it all started (for me)” - Comment from 14 Sep 2026 in “NEO Emacs – GPU-Accelerated Emacs Powered by Rust”
- Comment from 29 Aug 2026 in “e is a customizable self-aware Emacs-like editor written in Chez Scheme”
- Comment from 7 Dec 2025 in “The programmers who live in Flatland”
Verbose, confusing and not intuitive
“insufferable verbosity of EMACS Lisp that the insufferably verbose Stallman loved”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “git's –end-of-options Flag” “Elisp is an absolute opposite of being easy and intuitive”
Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs” “for me, Lisp an out, outdated and confusing thing”
Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “A Road to Lisp: Why Lisp”
Other programming languages people recommend
The four most recommended other programming languages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 163 programming languages, rankedWhat people said
40 of the 50 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Everything else is in ELisp, and can be manipulated to your heart's content”
“the thing that makes elisp so nice is that it has decades of use to iterate on an editor”
“elisp is mostly nice because it is polished, but it isn't necessarily the "best"”
“A little bit of Emacs Lisp turns it into a blogging engine.”
“The runtime is really well integrated in Emacs!”
“Elisp really sucks and is my least favourite part of emacs, which I use daily.”
“there is no reason a developer would struggle to learn elisp”
“how flexible elisp is to evaluate and poke and prod around with and how easy it is to debug”
“many people complain about elisp”
“Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp would be at the very top.”
“what makes elisp so cool to me”
“The generated Elisp code is often better on the first try than generated Kotlin code for a comparable task.”
“spending the (fun!) time writing my first harness in Emacs Lisp”
“I learned “real” programming in the early 90’s by learning Elisp to customize Emacs.”
“insufferable verbosity of EMACS Lisp that the insufferably verbose Stallman loved”
“I like the framing of Emacs and Elisp as Malleable Software”
“Since about 1992, I've used it as platform for many things”
“from all practical points it felt like almost using the same language everywhere”
“for me, Lisp an out, outdated and confusing thing”
“Current SOTA models work great with Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp.”
“I wish Emacs LISP gained ergonomic static typing.”
“Elisp is a dogshit language with abysmal performance, dynamic scope, mutable state everywhere, spicy hidden side effects, and a single niche implementation.”
“It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used”
“As far as scripting languages go, it's pretty good.”
“it's a Lisp, and therefore far better suited for the things Emacs is designed to do”
“It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used, unless at the uttermost end of need.”
“Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp.”
“it feels like reading poetry”
“Emacs Lisp methods tend to have very little state to them as well”
“Elisp is more practical as a scripting language than CL”
“I found it fun, well-documented, and powerful.”
“Lisp is poetic and if you've never learned one, you should!”
“It's not a language, it is everything you'll ever need.”
“It's the worst Lisp by far.”
“I've been using emacs and have written a a few thousand lines of elisp. I like elisp.”
“I quite like CommonLisp, EmacsLisp, Go for that.”
“I'd say elisp is a competitive lisp in its own right”
“Elisp is an absolute opposite of being easy and intuitive”
“I'd prefer Emacs Lisp had Common Lisp style packages”
“elisp covers the whole range from simple configuration to whole software”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.