In my opinion, it&#x27;s not Lisp that makes Emacs powerful. It&#x27;s a pluggable architecture evolved over about four decades that makes it powerful. Lisp is an implementation detail. Eclipse has a similar architecture and a somewhat similar trajectory.<p>Emacs and Eclipse have an architecture that allows the creation of applications on top of them that have little to do with what one would call &quot;their base configurations&quot;. They allow vertical adaptation to new purposes. Vim is more or less limited to extension horizontally and that&#x27;s in keeping with it&#x27;s philosophy of trying to do only one thing and a lightweight footprint.<p>It&#x27;s not all sunshine and rainbows. The architecture of Emacs has a dependency on eLisp and my understanding is the dependency is one of the things that has inhibited a move to multi-threading. That processor power has mostly kept the issue at bay, speaks to Emacs philosophy and these days for all its bloat, Emacs would have to be classified as relatively lightweight: the Windows install for 24.5 is a 50mb zip.