I got a pointer to an interesting Wilfred Hughes post from this Magnar Sveen tweet. The post, Adventures in Multi Paradigm Programming, looks at the power and flexibility of Emacs Lisp. One often hears how Elisp is a crappy language so this is a refreshing point of view.
The post looks at several languages using various programming paradigms, gives a short code snippet in that language, and then gives a corresponding snippet in Elisp that attempts to imitate the style of the original snippet.
Many of the more esoteric examples—from Haskell, for example—make use of Sveen’s dash library. That may seem like cheating but I think it illustrates one of the powers of Elisp: you can grow the language to add the functionality you need. The operative word here is you. You don’t need permission from a standards committee or anyone else. You just write the needed functions and macros to build the language you need to solve your problem.
Update: Haskal → Haskell (Hap tip to Xah Lee.)