I think of Emacs as being to Elisp what the JVM is to Java. It's a platform with a whole host of applications, some of which are good and many of which are less

I think of Emacs as being to Elisp what the JVM is to Java. It's a platform with a whole host of applications, some of which are good and many of which are less good. Examples of applications of great quality include calc, dired, evil, magit, comint, org – you just won't get these outside of the Emacs platform, much like a few years ago you couldn't run Minecraft outside of the JVM platform.