Although this article was written in 2010, his general complaint still applies. Compare a code-completion engine written for Emacs, with that written for Vim: auto-complete [1] is written completely in Elisp and utilizes Semantic as a source (mentioned in the article; also full Elisp), while a completion engine for Vim can be written in C++/ Python: Python is first-class, and it's a simple matter of invoking 'py import vim' [2] (it interfaces with the C++ code by simply importing the prebuilt ycm_core.so [3]). There is still no widely-used well-maintained clang completer for Emacs; the most dominant one spawns clang for everything [4].
That said, Emacs has a very rich Elisp ecosystem that's not going away anytime soon. By focusing on extensibility from the very beginning, Emacs has done many things right (it's just an Elisp interpreter with some editor functions bundled in); in comparison, Vim is a dumb-text editor focusing on keybindings, with extensibility as an afterthought. I don't think it is possible to replace Emacs today, primarily because writing a truly extensible text editor is a huge project with many boring parts, and there is no money to be made as a result. Elisp does have its drawbacks, and the Emacs community is suffering because of "philosophical" decisions like bzr (a dead project), instead of focusing on technical merit. So, the project will die a slow painful death, but I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
The takeaway is that Elisp needs to learn to interface with other languages better. There is a dead Elisp <-> Ruby bridge [5], but clearly not enough has been done about it.
[1]: https://github.com/auto-complete/auto-complete
[2]: https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe/blob/master/autolo...
[3]: https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe/blob/master/cpp/yc...
[4]: https://github.com/brianjcj/auto-complete-clang/blob/master/...
[5]: https://github.com/trogdoro/trogdoro-el4r
That said, Emacs has a very rich Elisp ecosystem that's not going away anytime soon. By focusing on extensibility from the very beginning, Emacs has done many things right (it's just an Elisp interpreter with some editor functions bundled in); in comparison, Vim is a dumb-text editor focusing on keybindings, with extensibility as an afterthought. I don't think it is possible to replace Emacs today, primarily because writing a truly extensible text editor is a huge project with many boring parts, and there is no money to be made as a result. Elisp does have its drawbacks, and the Emacs community is suffering because of "philosophical" decisions like bzr (a dead project), instead of focusing on technical merit. So, the project will die a slow painful death, but I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
The takeaway is that Elisp needs to learn to interface with other languages better. There is a dead Elisp <-> Ruby bridge [5], but clearly not enough has been done about it.
[1]: https://github.com/auto-complete/auto-complete
[2]: https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe/blob/master/autolo...
[3]: https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe/blob/master/cpp/yc...
[4]: https://github.com/brianjcj/auto-complete-clang/blob/master/...
[5]: https://github.com/trogdoro/trogdoro-el4r