There are plenty of things installed outside of the default PATH . This allows me to establish additional PATH information. At the moment, the only things that added are /usr/local/bin for homebrew on OS X and .cabal/bin for Haskell package binaries.

Emacs lisp is really only a subset of common lisp, and I need to have some of the additional functionality to make the configuration and its dependencies work properly, which we get by requiring Common Lisp for Emacs.