Comment by stiff

In common understanding of emacs, its use of lisp recieves perhaps too much attention, while its overall wonderful architecture is underappreciated. Emacs isnt just an editor with embedded lisp, its more a vm for bootstrapping editors. You could do an emacs with python, but the hard part is providing an environment where the extensions dont interfere with the user input loop, with buffer redisplay etc., while still staying easy to write. The emacs buffer-based async handling of external processes is a masterpiece of software engineering, much better than things like unix pipes. Doing extension languages for interactive programs is much harder than it seems at first, and emacs is a prime example of doing it right.