This isn't a vim vs emacs debate. We're talking about smalltalk and what do you know! emacs was made to resemble the big expensive lisp machines which were in turn made in the image of smalltalk but with lisp as the language of choice.
With this in mind, recommending emacs when someone states that they are interested in a system where the "code runs in a GUI that is also the editor/debugger/etc" does not seem out of place at all to me.
Pharo can also be recommended but its a lot more resource hungry and with a mouse centric workflow compared to emacs which is keyboard focused.
There are not just "lisp machines", but interactive Lisp implementations, coming with an IDE. The first of those were in the 60s, using text/terminal interfaces. The first Lisp already had interactive interface and end 60s "BBN Lisp" had a full-blown resident development environment, also using "images". In the 70s Smalltalk was developed (providing images, garbage collection, ... like Lisp before), then also on dedicated machines - at the same time frame Lisp was put onto these machines. BBN Lisp was then morphed Interlisp-D by Xerox, which was "Interlisp" ported to the Xerox D machines, running on the metal with a GUI added.
The Interlisp timeline gives an idea, that a lot of research into interactive development took place in the 60s and 70s, using it.
GNU Emacs is based on a Lisp system, but the focus was (is) to build an user-programmable, extensible editor, not to resemble a "lisp machine", which was a computer with an operating-system.
I wasn't commenting on Emacs vs Vim. My comment was regarding the meme-like nature of Emacs often being suggested for almost anything, almost "the Simpsons did it"-esque. My experience with Emacs is that it is a giant kluge, whereas Smalltalk and its kind are much more streamlined and simple. And Emacs is an editor driven and configured by a language. Smalltalk is a language that comes with an editor. They're different, and I don't think anyone is going to get a Smalltalk experience just working in Emacs.
This is correct. After trying out Smalltalk, I realised that Emacs has very much the same design: a minimal interpreted language which is used to implement a large program, where you can inspect and modify the program at any time. The major difference is that Emacs isn’t image-based.
Here we go ...