The greatness of Lisp -at least when it comes to end-user empowerment- and (I think) the only differentiating factor that most other languages have still not caught up to, is the cybernetic philosophy with its roots in Licklider (man-computer symbiosis) and Engelbart.
Building an environment that strongly and uncompromisingly expresses this philosophy at its core is a serious undertaking in terms of time investment.
Emacs has been in continuous development for 37 years and while it is still not as good as Genera, it's certainly "good enough" for lots of people and definitely captures the spark of this philosophy.
In the Common Lisp world, we've had plenty of tries (MCL, Hemlock, McCLIM) but they've all failed to get people to coalesce and generate progresss.
Maybe the fact that Emacs exists is a curse in that people realize the barrier they'll have to clear to make something substantially better and decide to devote their energies into more easily realizable efforts.
Building an environment that strongly and uncompromisingly expresses this philosophy at its core is a serious undertaking in terms of time investment. Emacs has been in continuous development for 37 years and while it is still not as good as Genera, it's certainly "good enough" for lots of people and definitely captures the spark of this philosophy.
In the Common Lisp world, we've had plenty of tries (MCL, Hemlock, McCLIM) but they've all failed to get people to coalesce and generate progresss.
Maybe the fact that Emacs exists is a curse in that people realize the barrier they'll have to clear to make something substantially better and decide to devote their energies into more easily realizable efforts.