This is a very good point. Check out http://vimeo.com/39938276 http://vimeo.com/39938276, a video about Ensime, a Scala/Java IDE as an external process. Daniel

This is a very good point. Check out http://vimeo.com/39938276 http://vimeo.com/39938276, a video about Ensime, a Scala/Java IDE as an external process. Daniel Spiewak makes largely the same point as this article: interprocess communication provides much better reusability than baking things in to a single process, whether that be Emacs or Eclipse. bitwize makes another good point: this is less the "philosophy of Emacs", and more the philosophy of Unix (or perhaps, more specifically, Acme). It's ironic that some of the best parts of Emacs are the ones that look less like a Lisp Machine and more like a Unix pipeline, but there it is.