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   Simon Dobson (simoninireland@mastodon.scot)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Feb-2023 10:26:13 JST Simon Dobson

   in reply to

   • Ramin Honary

   @ramin_hal9001 If I remember correctly Gosling did his emacs and then posted to a Lisp USENET group saying "Hey, if we all ran emacs, we could run the same software everywhere, without re-compiling!" -- and then promptly did Java. He was thinking about these ideas for a long time ? .

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     Ramin Honary (ramin_hal9001@emacs.ch)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Feb-2023 10:26:15 JST Ramin Honary

     • Inhabitant of Carcosa :emacs:

     According to this source on GitHub, before James Gosling invented the #Java programming language, he had implemented his own clone of #Emacs in the early #1980s written in C. This was done because an Emacs-like editor had not been ported to proprietary Unix systems at the time (this was before GNU was a thing). The code is now "open sourced," but the licensing is unclear. Still, might be worth a look for anyone who is interested in #TextEditor and programming languages.
     https://github.com/bobbae/gosling-emacs

     (EDIT: correction, thanks to @carcosa -- ML is "MockLisp", not Standard ML.)

     Charles Muller repeated this.
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     Ramin Honary (ramin_hal9001@emacs.ch)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Feb-2023 10:26:17 JST Ramin Honary

     in reply to

     @simoninireland

     Indeed he had. Its a good idea to support a small orthogonal set of core functionality (e.g. R7RS-small Scheme standard) so it is easy to port to multiple platforms and run the same high-level code everywhere. It is a shame he went with a C-like syntax and a virtual machine that does not support tail recursion. Then this led directly to the influence on JavaScript, and thanks to Sun Microsystem being so litigious over the rights to the JVM, eventually JavaScript won over Java to become the "write once run anywhere" language we all ended up with, and what a damn mess we are in now.

     It should have been Scheme.

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     Zac (lolzac@home.social)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Feb-2023 10:26:23 JST Zac

     in reply to

     • Inhabitant of Carcosa :emacs:
     • Ramin Honary

     @ramin_hal9001 @carcosa Holy heck! The code has checks for the baud rate of the display.

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     Thomas (tfb@functional.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Feb-2023 10:51:02 JST Thomas

     in reply to

     • Ramin Honary

     @ramin_hal9001 Oh the story is much more interesting. James Gosling wrote Emacs for Unix. Richard Stallman stole his implementation, and just changed the copyright notices on the files, and that became GNU Emacs.

     Check out Gosling’s recounting of the story here, including why he let him get away with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6XHroNewc&t=9896s

     BTW, if you look into the sources of that github repo, the .ml files are elisp. Those little summaries that GH gives you of what languages are used, aren’t especially accurage.

     #Emacs