[iLemming]

It's not just Elisp, I think, just any Lisp dialect gets this reaction. Which, honestly, I can't fully comprehend. Wait, how do even people use Emacs while at the same time hating Lisp? Isn't that kind of a painful way to deal with it in general? Sounds like having extreme motion sickness but still loving cars, puking all the way while driving them.

[egorelik]

I think there is a crowd, maybe less common than the others, that just want less warts. I can understand that, though I'm not sure the usual dialects that get thrown around are much better.

What I don't understand is wanting to replace elisp with a mainstream scripting language. None of them are really functional-style languages; it's just a completely different world.

(Non-scripting languages are a different story, but fundamentally a different use case.)

[iLemming]

> I don't understand is wanting to replace elisp with a mainstream scripting language

That typically comes from people without any experience in any Lisps. They don't know "REPL-driven development", they haven't heard about "structural editing", Lisp looks like a parenthesized mess to them. I looked at it the same way until I learned. Now I don't even notice parens - I see structure, beauty and reason.