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The reason editors seem to be a well populated niche, I think, is not only because it is a common need but because it is an application domain ripe for having an application+framework+extensions hybrid. The generic nature of the content being manipulated means that a generic buffer management framework can go a long way to allow humans to adapt it to many purposes. This generic approach also limits the complexity of writing an extension, which makes it more accessible to new or narrowly motivated hackers. Other content-generating applications with similar scripting potential exist in imaging and graphics, e.g. photoshop, gimp, cinepaint, blender. I am sure there are audio equivalents but I know less about those. An even more robust and powerful application plus framework is arguably an RDBMS system. Even if you limit yourself to the intended usage model, the commercial products like MSSQL and Oracle meet many of your criteria. Of course, the open source ones like PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and SQLite take this even further. They have pretty extensive internal interfaces you can also extend, if you are not content with the planned extensibility of SQL, stored procedures, etc. But, are you limiting yourself to standalone applications? Many frameworks are very modular and meet many of your criteria for software, but are intended to be consumed by developers and so may not have as much standalone function. Consider web app frameworks, conventional thick GUI frameworks, and more focused tooling like parser generators. And of course developers may be blind to them, but the operating systems and compilers we use are also rather elaborate and extensible frameworks. I think things like GCC and the Linux kernel demonstrably meet these criteria today, as they did when I was starting my career ~25 years ago. |