Emacs has no "plugins", it's all just Lisp code, all the way down. Big Ball of Mud architecture refined to a state of sublime elegance.
Can I put my cursor on a defun in Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, or IntelliJ, mash C-M-x, and immediately have that functionality available in my running editor session with all my work? I can in Emacs, and that capability has allowed me to smooth out the rough spots in many a workflow.
Lisp is not just an "implementation detail", it's central to what makes Emacs great. GNU Emacs is a running Lisp image, which you can extend and shape at will as you work on something else. A phenomenal tool.
No need to convert me there, I am already in the church.
For programming purposes emacs is not that different from any modern editor - there are some built-in capabilities, the rest you get from ELPA/MELPA/Git. It has no proper plugin arhitecture, which is a gift and a curse at the same time, but mostly works out. Where emacs shines compared to vscode/neovim/etc is that it has a very solid support for prose, org-mode, denote and prots color schemes which are that good. It is why I continue to use it, even though I am not interested in lisp per se these days and could easily replace it for programming with any other advanced editor.
Can I put my cursor on a defun in Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, or IntelliJ, mash C-M-x, and immediately have that functionality available in my running editor session with all my work? I can in Emacs, and that capability has allowed me to smooth out the rough spots in many a workflow.
Lisp is not just an "implementation detail", it's central to what makes Emacs great. GNU Emacs is a running Lisp image, which you can extend and shape at will as you work on something else. A phenomenal tool.