<i>but that goal could still be accomplished in a native application that embedded a JS runtime for plugins.</i><p>The easy-to-hack bit is not about the specific scripting language but about the UI being completely hackable.<p>No other editor (except emacs) lets you hack the interface as well as Atom.<p>And any attempt at exposing enough hooks to allow a native text editor UI to be as hackable would, in a kind of Greespun&#x27;s 10th rule, probably result in a bug ridden, poor implementation of an HTML engine.