[deleted]
James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
11–20 of 148 posts
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#12[deleted]
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#13Considering RMS' social skills and choice of priorities, I'm not exactly surprised by this. But yeah, seems to be old news randomly bubbling up… not gonna get excited about this.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#14Most of this is verified in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs
which uses this video as a source...
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#15Ouch, that's no small claim. I was just learning emacs because it's GPL... But if it was stolen then, well, that's an entirely different story... What about the other tools Stallman wrote ?
No small amount: gcc, gdb, gmake, made bison yacc compatible.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#16Ouch, that's no small claim. I was just learning emacs because it's GPL... But if it was stolen then, well, that's an entirely different story... What about the other tools Stallman wrote ?
If I were you I wouldn't make a personal ethical stand on this (by not learning GNU software). If you're the only one who does it, it can realistically only hurt you.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#17Anyone have any more info on the court case he referenced? I'm kinda surprised this isn't already common knowledge, given that IBM actually got sued over it.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#18What is it, a next generation of #metoo movement? Crowds of developers who were (allegedly) wronged 30+ years ago will come forth with their accusations?
> developers who were (allegedly) wronged 30+ years ago
I listened to it and didn't hear the story of a developer whining about being wronged 30 years prior. The guy says clearly that he wanted to move on from Emacs. On the other hand, it's the story of an alleged source code theft and copyright violation. I hope the story is false but I don't think it's irrelevant because 30 something years have passed.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#19Ouch, that's no small claim. I was just learning emacs because it's GPL... But if it was stolen then, well, that's an entirely different story... What about the other tools Stallman wrote ?
Don't learn emacs because it's GPL, or because of who wrote it. Learn emacs because it's a great tool.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#20From a 2002 Stallman lecture:
There was no free software Emacs editor that ran on Unix. I did, however, have a friend who had participated in developing Gosling's Emacs. Gosling had given him, by email, permission to distribute his own version. He proposed to me that I use that version. Then I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a real Lisp. It had a programming language that was known as ‘mocklisp’, which looks syntactically like Lisp, but didn't have the data structures of Lisp. So programs were not data, and vital elements of Lisp were missing. Its data structures were strings, numbers and a few other specialized things.
I concluded I couldn't use it and had to replace it all, the first step of which was to write an actual Lisp interpreter. I gradually adapted every part of the editor based on real Lisp data structures, rather than ad hoc data structures, making the data structures of the internals of the editor exposable and manipulable by the user's Lisp programs.
The one exception was redisplay. For a long time, redisplay was sort of an alternate world. The editor would enter the world of redisplay and things would go on with very special data structures that were not safe for garbage collection, not safe for interruption, and you couldn't run any Lisp programs during that. We've changed that since — it's now possible to run Lisp code during redisplay. It's quite a convenient thing.