What an opinionated piece of crap TFA is. This kind of stuff is precisely why I stopped reading The Reg a long time ago.
Seriously:
"4. The editor should contain no implementation of Lisp."
Why do they do that? Because of course Emacs totally rocks in their last example, where you need to apply the same modification to various lines (in Emacs you'd probably use a macro repeating some search and replace using a quick Lisp substitution).
How do you even want to talk with people who argue for their own limitation?
Appeal to authority: I urge people to read "Beating the average" from pg.