[bee_rider]

With Vim at least, and I think Emacs as well (although I don't use it), it seems like they have greater focus on providing the embedded scripting language, than deciding what to expose to the user via an API. In Vim's case at least, this seems to have resulted in multiple third party API-like projects (for things like installing plugins, linters, etc). It isn't clear to me the extent to which this is an artifact of the way the editor is structured, or to what extent it is just a result of having had time for these types of third party projects to grow.

There are pros and cons of course -- these weird shims can be troubling from a performance point of view, but on the other hand a plugin environment can grow, reach popularity, and then fall apart, and not take Vim down with them.