Re-reading this after a few years was interesting. At the time it really seemed like the Emacs ecosystem is stagnating but this has changed during the last two

Re-reading this after a few years was interesting. At the time it really seemed like the Emacs ecosystem is stagnating but this has changed during the last two years: package managers, crazy good, well maintained extensions (magit, org-mode, flycheck, Gnus), and small language changes. We even had an Emacs-only conference! ;) Still, elisp is elisp is elisp and there is no getting around that fact. The last Common Lisp rewrite/transformation has, AFAIK, stalled. 'cl is still not welcome in core packages. Just staying with the language and dealing with its quirks has proven very effective and I think this is in a large part due the flexibility of being a Lisp. It might be the wrong language for text-processing, but is the right language for ancient software that tries to stay recent.