I don't know...I feel like a lot of the emacs stuff is half-broken in weird ways (e.g., iedit mode doesn't work when editing grep results with grep-ed; hl-line-

I don't know...I feel like a lot of the emacs stuff is half-broken in weird ways (e.g., iedit mode doesn't work when editing grep results with grep-ed; hl-line-mode doesn't work if you're on the last line of a shell buffer, etc.). If I, as a programmer, tried to fix every broken elisp/emacs edge case I came across, I'd never get anything else done...and still not have a bug-free emacs, ya know? :) Agreed the ease of modification of emacs is unparalleled (and tricks like dynamic scoping can be handy at times), but I'm not convinced that it wouldn't be possible to get something aprox. as flexible and easy to modify with a more robust culture and langauge. (But not a classic "real OO" language, which I agree would be very annoying -- I'm thinking something with a strong functional flavor and static structural typing...) Whether this is really possible or not is an open question, though.