malmon The thing about lisp programming is that it's most powerful feature is that you can debug and step through programs while it's running using the REPL feature through heavy use of buffers, which Emacs is great at. Every forum thread or Q/A I've seen all generally say it's worth learning Emacs just for lisp programming. I'm just lazy and don't want to learn another ide before I even learn the language I actually want to study. To even navigate Emacs is an adjustment, let alone learn the features well enough to use it effectively. I may just have to bite the bullet and learn to walk before I can run. Currently I'm programming lisp in vim and then running it in sbcl from the command-line.
Lisp is a surprisingly old language (1960). It's older than C (1972), was used by NASA on some of their deep space projects. It's primary use is list processing, and has some really cool types specifically for that purpose that I've never seen in a language before. It's just a cool and useful language in general.