> > Separation into front-end and back-end modules. > That solves a lot of the Emacs trouble iiuc. True enough. Despite the fact that it's IMNSHO the best ed

> > Separation into front-end and back-end modules. > That solves a lot of the Emacs trouble iiuc. True enough. Despite the fact that it's IMNSHO the best editor out there, emacs is not without its problems. It has a lot of historical baggage. > I get the separation of concerns, but intermingling the concerns has helped emacs in a certain way. I agree. One of the huge features of emacs is that (above a very low level) everything is implemented in a fairly decent Lisp, and everything is available to Lisp code. How much will plugins be able to dig into one anothers' internals in order to get work done? Yes, monkey-patching is bad — but it's better than not being able to monkey-patch. Relying on plugin authors to expose extension points is probably not going to work in the long run: it really helps being able to define advice on functions, wrap functions, replace functions, mutate internal variables when one knows what one's doing &c.