> I'm assuming the learner is coming from an imperative language background. Well, Emacs Lisp is pretty imperative: it doesn't optimise tail calls, so loops ar

> I'm assuming the learner is coming from an imperative language background. Well, Emacs Lisp is pretty imperative: it doesn't optimise tail calls, so loops are often needed; its distinct namespaces/special-forms for functions and "values" (which includes anonymous functions) makes functional style less attractive in some situations; many tasks are achieved through destructive update of (often temporary) buffers; Emacs itself is controlled by mutating dynamic or global variables; etc. I would say Emacs Lisp is much closer to imperative languages like Python, than it is to syntactically-similar languages like Scheme, for example.