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Why not just write a similar editor, with same shortcuts, rewritten modules/modes etc, but with new architecture and paradigms?

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The existing body of Emacs Lisp packages is sufficiently large to make this a cost-prohibitive task.

I think this is something that light table is in a better position to pull off. It's new, doesn't have to worry about compatibility, and the worst case is you have to configure it with javascript (if I recall correctly) and not a lisp.

Whether or not it can, or even wants to, live up to that, is another matter entirely. But it'd be great if it does.

Light Table isn't going to pull off the effect of this project, because an editor which isn't compatible with emacs and isn't configured with lisp is a completely different proposition from emacs.

I mean, if the Eclipse project started today, you could say similar things about it. I am sure there exist emacs users who moved to Eclipse. But...

You're making it sound like a chore to script in lisp. The whole point is that lisp is probably the most concise and flexible (i.e. most powerful in both the pg sense and the conventional sense) way to customize a sufficiently large environment, Clojure maybe even more so than CL.

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