Lisp is interesting in its own right, but I want to be able to configure my editor in the language of my choosing. The Lisp is not the bottleneck. The problem

Lisp is interesting in its own right, but I want to be able to configure my editor in the language of my choosing. The Lisp is not the bottleneck. The problem with reconfiguring your editor is that you have to learn the API. That's a bunch of work, no matter what editor or language you use. It's not as if your extensive knowledge of Ruby means you can just sit down and start pounding out extensions for your editor. The difference between the 2+N hours you will spend mastering Lisp + the Emacs API and the N hours you will spend mastering the TextMate API becomes less and less important as N grows larger. I gave Textmate a serious try partly because I was curious, and one of the things I was curious about was: How great would it be to be able to configure my editor in Ruby, a language I really like? And the answer was: About ten seconds worth of great. I sat down to try to figure out how to do it, and took my first look at TextMate's API, and before I could even get into it the back of my brain spoke up: "Why are you teaching yourself the API to some proprietary software when you could be learning the equivalent-but-free emacs API, which is classic and was thought out by some fairly smart people and has a pile of very good free documentation and an awesome development environment called 'emacs' and which you won't ever need to learn more than once?" And that was that.