[jrockway]

I've written a lot of Emacs Lisp and a lot of Perl. Perl is better for bulk text processing, but that's not what editors do. The Emacs API is great for text editing. Once you are willing to treat blocks of text as buffers, everything gets very easy with Emacs Lisp. But most people are afraid to do that, because they are used to working with big opaque text objects and big batch transforms.

(Say you want to prefix every sentence with the expression "And then he said, ". The perl way: replace every empty space after a period or the beginning of the string with "And then he said, ". Emacs way: While there are sentences, go to the beginning of the next sentence and insert "And then he said, ". Same result, different way of thinking.)

Modify your way of thinking, and the Emacs model is wonderful. (Why do you think there are so many more Emacs extensions than Eclipse extensions, even though you can pretty much use any JVM langauge to customize Eclipse? It's because customizing Emacs is fast and easy.)