 He chose not to use it because of its comparatively poor performance on workstations (as opposed to the minicomputers that were Emacs' traditional home), and he wanted to develop a dialect which he thought would be more easily optimized.The Lisp dialect used in Emacs differs substantially from the more modern Common Lisp and Scheme dialects used for applications programming.A prominent characteristic of Emacs Lisp is in its use of dynamic rather than lexical scope by default (see below).