Funny, I'm a huge Lisper, yet I don't use Emacs. Conversely, I met people who would live and die by Emacs, who didn't know any Lisp, Emacs or otherwise.

I'm worried that if I started using Emacs, I'd start hacking the Elisp (which I'd be terribly good at), and hate the lack of lexical scope, etc.

I had some nice exchanges with Stefan; we discussed the implementation of generalized places not long ago:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/5By5NL4...

In TXR Lisp I implemented places in quite a different way from CL SETF expanders; from Stefan's comments I was informed that Emacs' "gv.el" is doing it in a similar way to my approach.