Have you had a look at Oberon? That's where Acme took most of its stuff from, and it being a fully integrated language, the interfaces between the parts are a lot cleaner.

That's what Oberon, Smalltalk and even Emacs Lisp have that's not as good in Unix. Files full of plain text plus executables are a good foundation, but they're also quite unstructured and so is communication between them. Command line parameter parsing is an absolute nightmare. Whereas if you use a language directly, that's just function parameters and you're also not restricted to arrays of strings as your sole communication format.

Not that Emacs is doing all that it can with that, as it's usually used as an intermediary between a high-falutin' language environment and text files.