Nathan Schneider
Update: The current state of my winter break deep dive into Emacs is that actually for all these years I've been using Emacs like Vim (as a text editor for just a few files at a time), and maybe I don't actually need to learn how to use a whole new computer, I just need to learn Vim.
I was honestly lying awake at night feeling icky about Stallman's authoritarian imagination. Why did the great advocate of the Unix philosophy then try to create an end-run around it?
Nathan Schneider
@JMarkOckerbloom Oh yes, I've been reading these histories obsessively too! But it seems to me it was under the dominance of GNU Emacs that it shifted from being an extensible text editor to an everything-machine.
John Mark Ockerbloom
@ntnsndr Stallman didn't create Emacs; there were already a number of versions of it when he started the GNU version. The most prominent predecessor was written primarily by James Gosling at CMU. (The Emacs editors grew out of an earlier line-oriented editor called Teco, which a number of people including Stallman had created macro packages for. Vim is the product of a different evolutionary line of editors that grew out of the line editor "ed".) More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs.
Luis Villa
@ntnsndr @JMarkOckerbloom I wonder to what extent that’s inevitable once you build popular general purpose extensibility into a tool that reads and writes (eg as compared Mozilla, very extensible but not very good at writing, mostly optimized for reading).
Nathan Schneider
@luis_in_brief @JMarkOckerbloom Honestly I'm pretty impressed by the level of UX innovations in the emacs space. So many things were radically reimagined—remote file management, git, file viewing, browsing, etc etc. It is really fascinating to explore how that ecosystem enabled a wholesale parallel universe of how computing could be done differently.
Luis Villa
@ntnsndr @JMarkOckerbloom also modern tools tend to make UX decisions early on that inevitably make extensions second-class, because the most easily accessible features get first-class-“space” in the UX (biggest buttons, shortest commands etc.) which demotes extensions to less-good interfaces. Emacs predates that so all extensions are first-class (which means none are).
Nathan Schneider
@rose_alibi That sounds wise. I needed to get here in my own way:)
a libi rose
@ntnsndr when you first posted about it my immediate reaction was "it sounds like you should just be using vim" but i didn't want to start a nerd fight in your comments 😆
Luis Villa
@ntnsndr @JMarkOckerbloom there’s an underexplored thread in Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said about a very early split in computing about wanting users to learn command line “vocabularies” of commands, and simplification/ease of use (not necessarily dumbing down). I assume there’s a deeper literature about that, and how emacs (and excel?) became outliers (with maybe modern IDEs as sophisticated bridges between the two worlds?)
Nathan Schneider
@luis_in_brief @JMarkOckerbloom I'd love to learn more about that history. When I take students to the @mediaarchaeologylab, I always make sure to stop at the library of old software manuals—relics of a time when it could be assumed that a user would read a paper text to learn how to use a computer program.
Luis Villa
@ntnsndr I guess it can’t hurt to poke @Markoff and see if he suggests further reading on the topic :) I wish I had his book to hand, but in a situation that would have blown the minds of many of his protagonists I am typing this on a pocket supercomputer while 30,000 feet in the air…
Nathan Schneider
@colby thanks that's helpful. Makes sense.
Colby Russell
@ntnsndr the real evidence of Stallman's anti-authoritarian stance is the way he wanted to architect HURD (as a way to keep admins who controlled the software of lab-owned systems in check and preserve the freedoms of the users).
Colby Russell
@ntnsndr where do you find Stallman portrayed as "the great advocate of the Unix philosophy"? Stallman was always an advocate of Lisp systems first, and he didn't start GNU because he loved UNIX and wanted a free version. GNU was a compromise because he predicted that UNIX and UNIX-likes would continue to grow in popularity, and though it wasn't a Lisp system, it was good enough as a development environment, and he could graft what he missed back on by way of Emacs.
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