So I wouldn't expect it to contain any particularly awesome lisp-isms. My first read made me think it was using multiple-dispatch, but it isn't doing so in a way that wouldn't also be possible in a language with overloading, as no more than 1 parameter is ambiguously typed at function call time.
If emacs + slime is to lisp what eclipse is to java, then I think that is what the GP was alluding to.
If you can find one Lisp tutorial that mentions only Vim or even shows Vim and Emacs as competing setups I would be genuinely surprised.
"There are 4 parentheses at the end of that call to cons. How do Lisp programmers deal with this? They don't. You could add or subtract a right paren from that expression and most wouldn't notice. Lisp programmers don't count parens. They read code by indentation, not parens, and when writing code they let the editor match parens (use :set sm in vi, M-x lisp-mode in Emacs)."
For vim users, the two choices are vim+slimv and emacs+evil. I find evil to be closer to vim than slimv is to a good slime experience, but that can change. Also, if you have any vim plugins that you really depend on then slimv probably edges out evil.
On the other hand I started out several years ago with viper plus a bunch of hand-coded elisp functions to use my most commonly-used vim commands, so we've come a long way.
It's really not elegant or special code at all, though, just something I used to learn some more about Lisp.