My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
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Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#2"They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off."
That bit really jumped out at me, because it's something I've felt about computers in general for a long time. People get it into their heads that computers are hard/complicated/etc., and so they get scared of them, and so then they don't do anything with them but a strict subset they've decided they understand and wind up doing all sorts of things wrong or inefficiently. Often, in trying to protect the computer and themselves from what they've convinced themselves they don't understand, they wind up breaking it instead: they don't know what they're doing because they think they can't learn. "It's too complicated."
Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#3I think it's interesting how he never explicitly says that he forked Gosling Emacs (I think that's what he did, but if not please correct me!).
"Therefore, when I wrote my second implementation of Emacs, I followed the same kind of design...Now, this [GNU Emacs] was not the first Emacs that was written in C and ran on Unix. The first was written by James Gosling, ... 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... I concluded I couldn't use it [it here means mocklisp, but can be confused to mean Gosling Emacs] 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...This second Emacs program was ‘free software’ in the modern sense of the term"
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#4I think it's interesting how he never explicitly says that he forked Gosling Emacs (I think that's what he did, but if not please correct me!). "Therefore, when I wrote my second implementation of Emacs, I followed the same kind of design...Now, this [GNU Emacs] was not the first Emacs that was written in C and ran on Unix. The first was written by James Gosling, ... I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a r…
Sounds like he Ship of Theseus'd it.
Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#5After reading this article, I read up on the history of Lisp Machines, and the conflict between Richard Greenblatt and Russell Noftsker. Interestingly, Noftsker was himself forced out of Symbolics after a battle with their CEO. Karma, I guess.
Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#6[deleted]
Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#7The fate of Symbolics wound up having little to do with Stallman, Greenblatt, or LMI. Sun et al. just blew away Symbolics with the economies of scale of UNIX workstations, and the advantages of LISP didn't persuade many people to go with LISP machines instead.
Similarly, Rational Software started out making ADA machines, and only survived and prospered after a total pivot away from hardware and ADA alike.
Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#8The fate of Symbolics wound up having little to do with Stallman, Greenblatt, or LMI. Sun et al. just blew away Symbolics with the economies of scale of UNIX workstations, and the advantages of LISP didn't persuade many people to go with LISP machines instead. Similarly, Rational Software started out making ADA machines, and only survived and prospered after a total pivot away from hardware and ADA alike.
Stallman has the normal sort of blindness most zealots have for areas outside of their zealotry. I have always found it a little bit fascinating to see what a naive view of the world he really has for anything that isn't the politics of software.
Which I don't say to be unfair, although I could see those who idolize him taking it that way.
Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#9> At the time, TCL was being pushed heavily for this purpose. I had a very low opinion of TCL, basically because it wasn't Lisp.
I figured this was the case[1], but hadn't actually seen it stated explicitly. His dislike usually seemed broached in hated of a commercial shepherd (Sun), or going on about (perceived or real) technical shortcomings.
Re: My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)
#10"They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off." That bit really jumped out at me, because it's something I've felt about computers in general for a long time. People get it into their heads that computers are hard/complicated/etc., and so they get scared of them, and so th…
Programs are so absurd to most people... they have to use rote learning to do anything with it (that's why changing the slightest bit will drive them mad). And most programs are full of hidden state. This is everything a programmer despise, we spend a huge amount of time ensuring our paradigms are principled and transparent, but these qualities rarely make it to the user level. So I cannot but sympathize with normal users about computer fear and wish them some better paradigm to reach acceptance (I believe ideas revived by Brett Victor are gold mines here)