"But it's hard to make it pay off." Absolutely. Emacs is already out. Similarly, while Elisp has its flaws (the lack of a good namespace system comes to mind),

"But it's hard to make it pay off." Absolutely. Emacs is already out. Similarly, while Elisp has its flaws (the lack of a good namespace system comes to mind), it's probably good enough. Efforts to rewrite Emacs in Common Lisp or Scheme seem to stall out, even (and the thought of porting all that legacy code is rather off-putting). I also think it's interesting how the author of the toplevel post has a textmate minor mode (http://ozmm.org/posts/textmate_minor_mode.html http://ozmm.org/posts/textmate_minor_mode.html) to add TextMate features to Emacs that I'm pretty sure it already has (e.g. go to symbol, find file within vc repo). I know I've re-implemented minor features of outline mode more than once.