A million lines of Lisp

This kind of loses me towards the end. I mean, sure, emacs is a freakishly large lisp program. I get that part. But, what's the point here?<p>The abstractions in emacs (modes and hooks are the ones discussed in the linked post) really aren't that strange, or unique, or even lisp-specific. Nor are they without analogs in other tools written in conventional imperative languages. An emacs written in python, frankly, wouldn't look that different. A mode by any other name would hook as smooth.

Ok, this is probably me being ignorant, but can't you do stuff like this to get macros in Python:<p><pre><code> import os, subprocess def macro(string, filename="~/macro.py"): program_name = os.path.expanduser(filename) out = open(program_name, 'w') out.write(string) out.close() command = ["python"] command.append(program_name) subprocess.Popen(command) macro("print 'Hello macro!'") </code></pre> It seems like with a bit of ingenuity you could achieve any level of abstraction using a technique like that.

I've been really interested in Lisp lately, for someone that knows next to nothing about this language, this is a pretty interesting read.