I've played in Smalltalk systems over the years, but not used it for anything serious. On one hand I like the idea of an image, being inspectable, adjustable,

I've played in Smalltalk systems over the years, but not used it for anything serious. On one hand I like the idea of an image, being inspectable, adjustable, etc. Yet on the other hand I'm also a fan of stateless, pure-functional approaches where possible (e.g. Haskell, Nix, etc.). I get a similar feeling from Emacs: it's really useful to inspect, override, debug, etc. the underlying Lisp; yet I prefer to keep my config as declarative as possible (e.g. via use-package). In fact, I rebooted recently and found that ANSI colour codes had stopped working in my Emacs terminals: turns out I'd forgotten to update my xterm-color config when switching from shell-mode to shx-mode several weeks ago!