
POSIX_ME_HARDER - fogus
http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html
======
Groxx
Yeah, I agree. POSIXLY_CORRECT is lamer than POSIX_ME_HARDER.

* goes back to reading __*

I'm only following about 1/3 of this, sadly. Anyone care to explain a bit?

~~~
andrewljohnson
This is one UNIX graybeard talking to another UNIX graybeard. You can hear the
vague sighs of longing for yesteryear when they mention things like PDP-10.

It's particularly funny when Stallman takes pleasure in GNU Emacs highlighting
some text, in the latest version.

All jokes aside, this is a fun read, and it gives you an almost softer side of
Stallman, because no one is trying to attack him (except for one brief moment
mid-article when they scuffle over Perl vs. Lisp and the fundament of lists
relative to the languages.

~~~
lenni
Yeah, I enjoyed it because I haven't read a Stallman interview yet that wasn't
about licenses, the FSF, politics or some thing that he strongly disagrees
with.

This reminds one that Stallman is a great hacker and not just a campaigner.

~~~
acqq
If you need to be reminded something is wrong. As far as I understand, the guy
made Emacs and GCC practically alone initially. Today every internet user uses
the code compiled by GCC whether he knows it or not. And it's not only the
technical aspect why it is so. Actively caring about licenses and politics
were necessary to reach the current state.

~~~
hga
Not EMACS, not any version of it.

He took over the original version EMACS after Guy Steele in particular
negotiated a common set of Editor MACroS and key bindings, and in the long
term he added some serious value to it.

The current EMACS we use (GNU or X) started from a fully functional version of
an EMACS written for the VAX in C by this obscure guy named James Gosling.
Even had a bytecode that its Mocklisp compiled into.

RMS started with a copy of that under ... questionable circumstances ... and
substantially improved it, e.g. giving it a full although unfortunately
dynamically scoped LISP.

I'm not sure who wrote the first Lisp Machine EMACS, named EINE (Eine Is Not
Emacs, a popular naming scheme at the time), but as I recall Dan Weinreb did a
lot of ZWEI (Zwei Was Eine Initially). It's likely RMS contributed to it, he
made quite a few contributions to the Lisp Machine's software.

~~~
acqq
Thank you for motivating me to check Wikipedia. According to it, Stallman was
very actively involved in growing TECO to Emacs in seventies. Apparently he
worked together with Guy Steele and Steele didn't remain in the project (I
know that different reasons for that can be imagined). Gosling made
proprietary Emacs for Unix in 1981, and Stallman makes GNU Emacs since 1984.

So what you mention can be summarized: Steele was also significant in early
history (before Unix implementations) Gosling made the first Unix
implementation (but proprietary one) and there were also Lisp Machine
implementations.

But Stallman was not only involved in Emacs before Unix, he was the guy who
managed to keep Emacs as widely usable as we know it today by creating the
free license and the free (GNU) Emacs.

So I still don't understand what your "not any version of it" was supposed to
mean.

~~~
hga
Errr ... I don't particularly care about what Wikipedia says, since _I was
there_ for the Gosling->GNU version and learned the TECO/PDP-10/20 story from
eyewitnesses; the Wikipedia version gives a bit too much very early emphasis
to Stallman for the latter.

Many people contributed to TECO macros, to the point where there were three or
more major versions and people had the problem of not being able to
necessarily sit down at a colleague's terminal and type into their editor.

Guy Steele spend a week or so obtaining order out of chaos (biggest issue was
negotiating the common key bindings, something I assure you RMS is not
diplomatic enough to do :-) and near the end of this Stallman joined and then
took over the project and most especially its leadership. For Steele this was
just a problem to be solved and once it was in good hands he had other fish to
fry (e.g. Scheme).

Another semi-correction to Wikipedia is that there were one or more ersatz
UNIX EMACS versions floating around before Goslings' (ersatz by RMS's
terminology; they had the basic command set and key bindings but if you needed
to change or add anything you had to dive into the C code. This was a
necessary limitation for running on the PDP-11 with its severe 64K of code and
56K of data limits). There was also a serious 32 bit version built on top of
ex as I remember, but it stayed commercial and therefore died.

My "not any version of it" refers to your "As far as I understand, the guy
made Emacs ... practically alone initially." Which to me implies that he
started the projects or at least was an initial team member, which was not
true for either the TECO or 32 UNIX versions. Instead, he took over existing
healthy versions and made them much better. By the time I showed up on the
scene, he was emphasizing self-documentation and extensibility, the latter of
which was by and large never offered except through a LISP. (Perhaps a bit
pedantic, but I'm a scientist by training so getting attributions of this sort
correct is important to me.)

SINE may be an early exception since it was a custom LISP like language for
building its EMACS, but its community was so small (the Media Lab precursor)
I'd doubt any normal mortals played with it. Whereas Bernie Greenberg was
intensely proud about how he managed to make MULTICS EMACS so accessible that
MIT secretaries were doing their own extensions, generally started from a key
sequence capture.

Bernie was big on "LISP for the masses" (along with a number of others in this
period); as I recall, he was the author of a very good medium length (less
than 100 pages) general introduction to the language, _Notes on the
programming language LISP_ and frequently taught a course during January based
on it ("LISP is is for 'interesting' programs, as opposed to, say, accounts
receivable." (rough paraphrase of the start of his motivation for learning it;
everyone knew it was _the_ cool language at the time and he was great at
expressing why and why you might find it useful)).

~~~
acqq
Thank you, so I think can you agree that your "not any version of it" still
doesn't refer to GNU Emacs, which is obviously his own version and the only
one (except XEmacs, later fork of GNU Emacs, as far as I know) that
practically survived through the years, thanks exactly to his recognition of
how licensing is a very important factor and to a lot of his own work, as you
also mention. I also understand that he didn't start "from nothing" but I've
never claimed that, my "practically alone" referred to "GNU Emacs" and I
missed to write GNU. Do you know other Emacs programs still used today? I
admit it was not precise enough, and I thank you for the historical insights,
the possibility to get them here is a real treasure!

------
gaius
That's interesting - I only discovered undo within a region last week, and
it's been there for 10 years...

