I learned emacs not too long ago, and I was amazed that the better principles were established so much earlier and abandoned for new tools. One thing about its philosophy I think makes it better is the consistency of everything being buffers, commands, and keystrokes. Eclipse has multiple kinds of buffers, views, panels, dialogs, and keys, menus, toolbars, docks, etc., that aren't interchangeable. It reminds me of the syntax philosophies of Lisp and Java - the tools follow the languages.