[brudgers]

In my opinion, it's not Lisp that makes Emacs powerful. It's a pluggable architecture evolved over about four decades that makes it powerful. Lisp is an implementation detail. Eclipse has a similar architecture and a somewhat similar trajectory.

Emacs and Eclipse have an architecture that allows the creation of applications on top of them that have little to do with what one would call "their base configurations". They allow vertical adaptation to new purposes. Vim is more or less limited to extension horizontally and that's in keeping with it's philosophy of trying to do only one thing and a lightweight footprint.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows. The architecture of Emacs has a dependency on eLisp and my understanding is the dependency is one of the things that has inhibited a move to multi-threading. That processor power has mostly kept the issue at bay, speaks to Emacs philosophy and these days for all its bloat, Emacs would have to be classified as relatively lightweight: the Windows install for 24.5 is a 50mb zip.