This is Yet Another Example of the amazing utility of being able to easily and stably extend one's environment. emacs is just a text editor, but this project is changing it into a Stack Exchange client. That's useful!
"GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing."
Text editing is a subset of Emacs and Emacs Lisp, not the other way around.
I know. But it was written as just a text editor—but an extensible one, and so it has grown to be a lot more. Which is really pretty awesome.
No it's not. It is really a big REPL optimized for text processing. You compare Emacs to the like of Python, not just some random editor. Unlike other editors that have an optional extension language, if you remove Emacs Lisp, effective you remove Emacs. Even file opening is written in Emacs Lisp.
Yes, of course emacs is a big REPL optimised text processing. But it's optimised for text processing because…it started out as a text editor.
The whole point of what I wrote is that emacs started out as a simple text editor (yes, I'm aware that its origin was as text editing macros for TECO) and due to its extensibility it can and has become so much more.
Really, I think you got way too hung up on the word 'just.'
We both love emacs. We both love having a fully-extensible text editing environment.
I just wanted to clarify in case someone read your comments and have a wrong impression that Emacs is a text editor like Vim. Nothing more, nothing less.