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   Omar Antolín (oantolin@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:06:10 JST Omar Antolín

   On the #Emacs subreddit someone asked: "What exactly is the advantage of having a LISP machine at my fingertips?". I gave an example, which I reproduce here:

   One time I organized a conference session. I had to select among submitted talks and schedule them. The conference had a website I could log into to see all the submitted abstracts, so I wrote some elisp code to download all the abstracts and create a nicely formatted #OrgMode file with all the information —Emacs comes with functions to make HTTP requests and with a full HTML parser!

   Once I chose the talks to accept (which I tagged in the Org mode file), I wrote a quick bit of elisp to write emails to all the talk applicants notifying them of their acceptance or rejection. This code used Org's parsing functions to go through the talks, get the applicant information and to pick either the acceptance or rejection template as appropriate. The code didn't actually send the emails, it just created and pre-populated message-mode buffers so I could review and customize the messages before sending.

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   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:06:47 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     @oantolin Alas, this has nothing to do with "having a Lisp Machine at your fingertips"; it is just having Lisp.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:21:45 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     @oantolin Emacs predates Lisp Machines. Emacs is an editor, nothing more or less. It is not a Lisp environment, or a Lisp implementation.

     And yes, it is about Lisp, an extensible language. Emacs is special, but it is for other reasons.

     #GNU #Emacs is a far shot from #LispM #LispMachine, and ZWEI is a far shot from #GNU #Emacs.

   • Embed this notice
     Omar Antolín (oantolin@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:21:46 JST Omar Antolín

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt (1) The reddit user meant "Emacs" when he or she said "Lisp Machine", I understood this and answered accordingly.

     (2) It does have something to do with having a Lisp Machine at your fingertips! While Emacs is definitely not a Lisp Machine it seems wrong to me to say it is completely unrelated ("nothing to do") to Lisp Machines. Certainly of all the software I have installed on my computer the only program for which the experience of using it is even remotely close to what I imagine the experience of using a Lisp Machine is Emacs, even if people who have used such a machine feel it is far. (And those people probably agree that, say, Firefox is even further).

     (3) It is not just having Lisp! I didn't just program in Lisp, I used the integration with the environment I was working in (Emacs). This is not automatic. I've written programs in Lisp which are not interactive, and not easily extensible (you can say it was stupid of me to write such useless programs but I had my reasons at the time, like wanting to know the result of some computation). There is something special about Emacs beyond having Lisp.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:26:43 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     @oantolin Not all Emacs behaved that way, specifically TECO Emacs and LispM Emacs (ZWEI). Emacs is an extensible text editor, not a Lisp environment. This is not to be confused with #GNU #Emacs, which is more.

   • Embed this notice
     Omar Antolín (oantolin@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:26:44 JST Omar Antolín

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt I agree with everything you said except for "Emacs is not a Lisp environment", since I can readily evaluate Emacs Lisp code and use it to modify the behavior of Emacs. The rest I agree with and believe it does not contradict anything I've said.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:30:32 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     @oantolin #GNU #Emacs implements Emacs, but also implements more (and less). Sometimes it goes against the idea of Emacs,

   • Embed this notice
     Omar Antolín (oantolin@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:30:33 JST Omar Antolín

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt Ah, OK. I apologize for misspeaking. I meant GNU Emacs everytime I said Emacs and have never used any other Emacs.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:31:34 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     @oantolin Absolute nonsense.

   • Embed this notice
     Omar Antolín (oantolin@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:31:35 JST Omar Antolín

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt Also you should probably take into account that empirically speaking the hastag #Emacs on Mastodon means GNU Emacs specifically (at least the vast, vast majority of the time).

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:35:17 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     @oantolin Is GNUS part of Emacs (the text editor) or part of #GNU #Emacs? Magit? Eww? Calc?

     None of these are part of Emacs. They are separate programs, useful but separate.

   • Embed this notice
     Omar Antolín (oantolin@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:35:18 JST Omar Antolín

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt That's interesting. Can you share an example of Gnu Emacs going against the idea of Emacs? I would have no clue about this, since the only Emacs I know is Gnu Emacs.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:35:42 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     @oantolin troll. plonk.

   • Embed this notice
     Omar Antolín (oantolin@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 05:35:43 JST Omar Antolín

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt Really? You think the claim that the vast majority of Mastodon posts with the hastag #Emacs are about GNU Emacs is "absolute nonsense"? You and I must not be seeing the same posts! :D That's exciting to me because I am curious to read more about non-Gnu Emacsen.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 15:19:38 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     • Thomas Ingram

     @tiang plonk.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:01:26 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Vassil Nikolov

     @vnikolov No, Emacs is not a virtual machine -- there is nothing in the idea of Emacs that requires a VM. For example, Hemlock Emacs, CLIMacs are Emacs -- they do not have a VM. You can even have a full non-ersatz Emacs implemented in something else than Lisp.

     @Zenie@piaille.fr

   • Embed this notice
     Vassil Nikolov (vnikolov@ieji.de)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:01:35 JST Vassil Nikolov

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt
     • Zenie

     @Zenie @oantolin @amszmidt
     Indeed.
     It is worth repeating what has long been pointed out: Emacs is _a virtual lisp machine_ with diverse capabilities, including (but emphatically not limited to) very extended editing capabilities.
     It is priceless to have the confidence and the ability to automate operations unforeseen by the creators of Emacs.

   • Embed this notice
     Zenie (zenie@piaille.fr)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:01:36 JST Zenie

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @oantolin @amszmidt

     Totally agree, emacs is first and foremost a lisp environment. Scratch is a default buffer!!
     It happens to have some great functionalities for editing. That's the purpose it evolved from.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:21:44 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Vassil Nikolov

     @vnikolov GNU Emacs didn't exist in 1980, not sure how it can have happened then ... 😜

   • Embed this notice
     Vassil Nikolov (vnikolov@ieji.de)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:21:46 JST Vassil Nikolov

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt
     Most importantly, the statement "Emacs is a virtual lisp machine" is metaphorical more than it is technical.
     And then "Emacs" unqualified means GNU Emacs by default.
     But this "discourse" has been conducted (and recorded for the proverbial diligent reader 🙂) very extensively since about the 1980s.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:29:46 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Vassil Nikolov

     @vnikolov Then what do you mean?

   • Embed this notice
     Vassil Nikolov (vnikolov@ieji.de)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:29:47 JST Vassil Nikolov

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt That is neither the meaning of 'this "discourse"' nor of '1980s'.

   • Embed this notice
     Alfred M. Szmidt (amszmidt@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:40:31 JST Alfred M. Szmidt

     in reply to

     • Vassil Nikolov

     @vnikolov As someone who was around the 80s, I fail to see what your point is. If the samples are so easy, please quote them.

   • Embed this notice
     Vassil Nikolov (vnikolov@ieji.de)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 21:40:32 JST Vassil Nikolov

     in reply to

     • Alfred M. Szmidt

     @amszmidt The 1980s are a decade in which numerous discussion were already taking place on what emacs (in the generic sense) is or isn't (some of them fairy heated).
     They may have started even before 1980 and they continued after 1989, of course.
     I am sure enough samples are easy to find in various archives and I am sure many of them are still worth reading.