As someone who is glancingly familiar with emacs (I have only ever written one elisp function, that too with help) it's a really stupid question, but couldn't emacs have bindings for lua or python or something? That would increase the number of people who can program for it and customize it.
> in 20 years from now Emacs will still be around
I think the real risk for emacs is, over the years, slowly losing the pool of people who care enough to contribute to it -- not just core developers, but also people who write packages, themes, etc. I already see a lot of developers who think Atom / VSCode / Sublime Text is "good enough". You may choose to discount Sublime because it's closed source (I do despite loving it otherwise), but VSCode and Atom are open-source and browser technology is only going to get better.
It can, and here is an example: https://blag.bcc32.com/ecaml-getting-started/2017/11/05/emac...
And here is a better link I guess: http://diobla.info/blog-archive/modules-tut.html
That layer of C is hardly "tiny." Everything from font drivers to process management to a lisp interpreter to window and buffer code, to overlays, and a lot more.
But yah, not tiny, sure. I'm looking forward to it being replaced via the REmacs project.
In my experience nothing beats Emacs at editing text. Vim has better shortcuts, but Emacs is just smart about everything.
My problem with Emacs is that it’s showing its age, it’s hard to configure and you have to learn an old and obscure LISP dialect for it. On the other hand I’ve heard that VS Code plugins are a joy to develop, MS apparently did a good job at that.
But Emacs? Yes please, I want that — plus to be honest, in 20 years from now Emacs will still be around, whereas I have my doubts about these fancy new editors.