Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Emacsification of Software

sockpuppet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 304 posts

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#141

Post by saltcured »

iLemming wrote: post #102
shaokind wrote: post #6

I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs. But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell…

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible I honestly can't even relate to what that even means. I'm a programmer - my everyday job is all about changing the behavior of computer systems - local, remote, cloud, embedded, etc. Requirements change, scope fluctuates, problem space evolves - grows and shrinks, accretion is unavoidable. I need to routinely move between language stacks, different data types…

I think your analogy breaks down because lots of people don't program "anything and everything". I can relate to being considered quite an expert in certain programming domains among my peers, but there being all kinds of potential programming around me that I just don't find interesting at all.

Programming is also so much broader than something like cooking. It would be like saying that "you make your living manipulating matter, how could you not want to manipulate all that other matter?" to a chef. Their cooking doesn't necessarily make them want to mend clothes, remodel houses, devise new pharmaceuticals, etc.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#143

Post by iLemming »

peacebeard wrote: post #139
iLemming wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the cartoon character once said: "Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad"... Re-read again what I wrote. Specifically about delusions. I can't believe I have to re-quote myself just to prove you my point about something you just made up in your head.

I'll re-quote it for you: > Thinking that you're a programmer that doesn't want to constantly build software for your own sake is a delusion - it's like a cook that hopes to turn on the stove only in the restaurant, but won't touch a knife at home. > Emacs is the cook's home kitchen. The two sentences are adjacent. I read them as connected. If you meant them to be unrelated, I hope that this sheds light on our disagr…

How often do you fish out a single word in a paragraph that has no semantic, emotional meaning to you personally and automatically flip the entire book, just because of one word?

What I meant is that viewing Emacs merely as a means to achieve a singular goal and to extract specific value (e.g. "I've heard Magit is nice") is shortsighted - approaching it as a strategic, long-term investment yields far greater returns. I'm not preaching for absolutely every programmer to use it.

Come on, now tell me how I think of everyone who doesn't approve my web-browser tweaking habits as "catastrophic failures"...

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#145

Post by vonunov »

tptacek wrote: post #103
dang wrote: post #55

This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!) Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier…

There's something about this whole situation that rhymes with the issue of LLM-generated prose. It's not that GPT 5.5 writes bad prose (I mean, it doesn't write good prose, but it's not awful). It's that once I pick up on the text being GPT 5.5's, my brain switches into a mode where it starts reminding me "this is just GPT output, you could just ask GPT 5.5 these questions yourself, and get answers better tailored to…

I don't want to make this about people's faith or whatever, but to put it frankly, I've heard a lot of contemporary Christian music, I don't care for it, and [I like to think] I can reliably recognize it in three notes or fewer,¹ which may or may not bear out in rigorous testing, but saves me a lot of time either way. This feels like it parallels strongly with the topic at hand

1. erring on the side of sounding cooler

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#146

Post by iLemming »

saltcured wrote: post #141
iLemming wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible I honestly can't even relate to what that even means. I'm a programmer - my everyday job is all about changing the behavior of computer systems - local, remote, cloud, embedded, etc. Requirements change, scope fluctuates, problem space evolves - grows and shrinks, accretion is unavoidable. I need to routinely move between language stacks, different data types…

I think your analogy breaks down because lots of people don't program "anything and everything". I can relate to being considered quite an expert in certain programming domains among my peers, but there being all kinds of potential programming around me that I just don't find interesting at all. Programming is also so much broader than something like cooking. It would be like saying that "you make your living manipul…

Yeah, sure analogies are... well... some made up shit we use, because we have imagination. And the imagination can take you for a spin.

I just disagree with why Emacs heavy users are often "blamed" to be obsessed with their tools "needlessly". What does it even mean to desire "as little maintenance as possible"? Okay, let's say I don't use Emacs (which is like I dunno over 90% of existing programmers in the world). What, I won't be writing bash scripts for my work? Okay, maybe I really hate Bash. Python then? Lua? Perl? What the hell are we even talking about? Of course, a programmer will do these things. Every programmer does. There's not a single case where a programmer doesn't tweak, re-tweak, personalize, improve, readjust their tooling, their scripts, browser extensions, the set of apps they use. Why is it Emacs and Vim considered a "perpetual maintenance", and I dunno, VSCode is "it just works™"? That's just not true. If I didn't use Emacs, I'd be inevitably re-inventing some workflow automation in some different way. Or what, bash-scripts ain't no software?

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#147

Post by ijidak »

tptacek wrote: post #105

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim: * Podcast apps * Music listening apps * Feed readers * Bluesky clients * Note-taking apps * Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps * Chat and instant messaging * Time trackers * Recipe managers These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not…

I'd add Email to the list.

Email is right there waiting for disruption.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#148

Post by satvikpendem »

bo1024 wrote: post #114
tptacek wrote: post #105

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim: * Podcast apps * Music listening apps * Feed readers * Bluesky clients * Note-taking apps * Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps * Chat and instant messaging * Time trackers * Recipe managers These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not…

The common denominator: the data needs to be owned by you, or at least made accessible. Companies love to create walled gardens where they own the content and control how you access it, making this kind of personalized interface impossible. Hopefully we can push back more now.

Not necessarily, you can ask the LLM to reverse engineer the protocol.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#149

Post by volemo »

dharmatech wrote: post #124
tptacek wrote: post #105

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim: * Podcast apps * Music listening apps * Feed readers * Bluesky clients * Note-taking apps * Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps * Chat and instant messaging * Time trackers * Recipe managers These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not…

Our social media should be decentralized and local first, allowing for bespoke clients on any OS. This is an experiment towards that: https://github.com/dharmatech/9social The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...) Video demo: https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code. And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavi…

How to upvote in bold? /j

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#150

Post by numpy-thagoras »

dharmatech wrote: post #124
tptacek wrote: post #105

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim: * Podcast apps * Music listening apps * Feed readers * Bluesky clients * Note-taking apps * Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps * Chat and instant messaging * Time trackers * Recipe managers These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not…

Our social media should be decentralized and local first, allowing for bespoke clients on any OS. This is an experiment towards that: https://github.com/dharmatech/9social The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...) Video demo: https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code. And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavi…

I love this idea. Thank you for the examples!

I've been thinking of this as well:

Something like old school Facebook in UI, but functions more like MSN Messenger. You connect to your contacts via P2P, and download/upload updates to your social media network.

Post reply on HN