Oh boy yet another treemacs question!

Elisp isn’t just a programming language it’s an execution environment and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to consider them separately.

For example the largest abstraction in elisp is the buffer. A lot of core language features revolve around and are greatly modified by the buffer. For example variable bindings can typically be overrides in buffer-local variables.

Furthermore there’s a lot of editor specifics that are interesting. Text properties are the least of which. Buffer narrowing is another. But what about… fields? Judicious use of fields limits where you can type into a buffer. Consider the customize user interface for example.

Basically emacs is a complete tui development environment.

I recently had cause to try to load some code into a JavaScript repl from a typescript project. Man what a nightmare.

The js ecosystem is very difficult to work with. Many options and browser issues are intertwined. Clever ideas abound… but that might be part of the issue.

JavaScript wouldn’t be an improvement over elisp imo. The theory is that a more accessible language would bring users, but many devs aren’t interested in anything but getting the job done with vs code and then going home.

And honestly the ridiculous quickness in which things get deprecated despite no replacement is a bad developer mindset.