On the Fediverse, I had a hot take:

Hot take: the enduring popularity of writing applications in a list of environments that starts with Emacs Lisp and goes on to encompass things like Electron shows that we've persistently failed to create a good high level programming system for writing text-focused applications.

(Plan 9's Acme had some good ideas but it never caught on, partly because Plan 9 didn't.)

(By 'text focused' here I mean things that want primarily to display text and have some controls and user interface elements; this is somewhat of a superset of 'TUI' ideas.)

People famously have written a variety of what are effectively applications inside GNU Emacs; there are multiple mail readers, the Magit Git client, at least one news reader, at least one syndication feed reader, and so on. Some of this might be explained by the 'I want to do everything in GNU Emacs' crowd writing things to scratch their itch even if the result is merely functional enough, but several of these applications are best in class, such as Magit (among the best Git clients as far as I know) and MH-E (the best NMH based mail reading environment, although there isn't much competition, and a pretty good Unix mail reading environment in general). Many of these applications could in theory be stand alone programs, but instead they've been written in GNU Emacs Lisp to run inside an editor even if they don't have much to do with Emacs in any regular sense.

(In GNU Emacs, many of these applications extensively rebind regular keys to effectively create their own set of keyboard commands that have nothing to do with how regular Emacs behaves. They sometimes still do take advantage of regular Emacs key bindings for things like making selections, jumping to the start and end of displayed text, or searching.)

A similar thing goes on with Electron-based applications, a fair number of which are fairly text-focused things (especially if you extend text focused things to cover emojis, a certain amount of images, and so on). For a prominent example, VSCode is a GUI text editor and IDE, so much of what it deals with is text, although sometimes somewhat fancied up text (with colours, font choices, various line markings, and so on).

On the Internet, you can find a certain amount of people mocking these applications for the heavy-weight things that they use as host environments. It's my hot take that this is an unproductive and backward view. Programmers don't necessarily like using such big, complex host environments and turn to them by preference; instead, that they turn to them shows that we've collectively failed to create better, more attractive alternatives.

It's possible that this use of heavy weight environments is partly because parts of what modern applications want and need to do are intrinsically complex. For example, a lot of text focused applications want to lay out text in somewhat complex, HTML-like ways and also provide the ability to have interactive controls attached to various text elements. Some of them need to handle and render actual HTML. Using an environment like GNU Emacs or Electron gets you a lot of support for this right away (effectively you get a lot of standard libraries to make use of), and that support is itself complex to implement (so the standard libraries are substantial).

However, I also think we're lacking text focused environments for smaller scale programs, the equivalent of shell scripts or BASIC programs. There have been some past efforts toward things that could be used for this, such as Acme and Tcl/Tk, but they didn't catch on for various reasons.

(At this point I think any viable version of this probably needs to be based around HTML and CSS, although hopefully we don't need a full sized browser rendering engine for it, and I certainly hope we can use a different language than JavaScript. Not necessarily because JavaScript is a bad language or reasonably performing JavaScript engines are themselves big, but partly because using JavaScript raises expectations about the API surface, the performance, the features, and so on, all of which push toward a big environment.)