I like to think of Emacs more as a platform for a collection of Emacs lisp programs living in a shared process space. It's not unlike what I've seen of Smallta

I like to think of Emacs more as a platform for a collection of Emacs lisp programs living in a shared process space. It's not unlike what I've seen of Smalltalk (though I don't use that myself): you wouldn't necessarily think of the Smalltalk VM and image as a huge monolith program.