Understandable, but it also seems like there is a disconnect between the philosophy of vi and the philosophy of Lisp. Vi is designed to be purely a text editor, and not an environment for building text based applications. Common Lisp being so inherently interactive, seems to require a dynamic, interactive text editing environment. Like Emacs.
But that is old. Vim can easily interact with lisp real time. It would and probably never will be the same as emacs which is a lisp env. Still it is good enough.
GNU Emacs nor XEmacs also can not behave like ZMACS on lisp machines - there's just as much disconnect as between (n)ViM and lisp image. It's always a remote, RPC-like relation.
In fact, I'd say that a certain ancient Erlang mode for Emacs resulted in closer relationship between Emacs and Erlang, as it made Emacs into a process in OTP cluster.
