I was searching the #Emacs subreddit for ‘IRC’ and found this justification for using Emacs for more than just editing text:
‘Emacs is the last remnant of Lisp-based operating systems that predate Unix … Lispers had to migrate to Unix.’
‘With Emacs, people are basically trying to painstakingly recreate the look and feel of Lisp Machines of yore and forget that they need Unix to run them.’
🔗 https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/2zvhmu/emacs_vs_linux_why_not_use_a_terminal_and/cpn4qfs/
@amdt Although the #Emacs is a #lisp machine meme sounds appealing, it is not true. Emacs is a 'lisp machine' where everything is text. Lisp Machine allowed you to interact with the objects in memory as they were running. In that respect it is more similar to Smalltalk than to Emacs.
Ken Pitman makes a good argument here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/XpvUwF2xKbk%5B101-125%5D
@PuercoPop I agree: sometimes people claim Emacs is a Lisp Machine — because it interprets a Lisp, supports introspection somewhat and provides a uniform user interface — but even if that were true, in comparison it is a very poor Lisp Machine. It’s no surprise Smalltalk is more similar since Symbolics was heavily inspired by that environment. Thanks for the link!