
How Emacs changed my life - afshinmeh
http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed-my-life?
======
D9u
75 slides to convey an impression which could have been spelled out in a
paragraph or two...

Anyone with a slow connection knows what I'm upset about.

Needless to say, I quit when I was about 24 slides into the presentation.

~~~
arocks
Sorry to disagree, but

1\. The transcript of the entire slideshare presentation is below the slide.
This is the case for every presentation on Slideshare and you can skim that if
you are in a hurry.

2\. I dislike content-stuffed powerpoint slides like most viewers would. It is
usually recommended to keep the text per slide at a minimum even if the
content needs to be spread across many slides.

~~~
kamaal
>>It is usually recommended to keep the text per slide at a minimum

The point is, slides are teaching and not information recording/storing tools.

Most people forget this plain simple fact.

First principle of giving a presentation, ensure people focus on what you say
and not on your slides.

~~~
vanderZwan
Well, then he made the right choice, because he turned his presentation into a
summarised subtitle of the story he was telling.

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optimusclimb
What's awesome is how all of us can probably attribute similar life changes to
various software discoveries.

Though it's much weaker than saying "emacs influenced the massively adopted
programming language I went on to write"...in many ways, having a computer
that, as is - was unable to run Doom - led me to understand good old
autoexec.bat and config.sys, what extended memory and himem.sys were, mouse
drivers, etc, etc.

On the emacs front - emacs lead me to realize how useless the capslock key
was, rebind it to Ctrl on all of my computers, and forever make numerous
typing mistakes whenever I use someone else's keyboard :) Worth it.

Good little read.

~~~
pseut
I've never understood the caps lock/control switch; swapping the ctrl and alt
on one side of the keyboard just feels so much more natural to me: left thumb
is alt, right thumb is ctrl.

~~~
tempestn
It seems extremely awkward to me to be regularly trying to hit alts with your
thumbs. In a normal typing position your thumbs rest near the middle of the
spacebar. That's quite a reach, under your hand, which is trying to hit
another key at the same time. Definitely worse than hitting ctrl with a pinky,
at least for me.

~~~
pseut
It's less awkward on a laptop keyboard than on a desktop, but it feels pretty
natural at this point (I've been using it for 7 or 8 years now). Don't you
have to use your thumbs to hit alt/meta anyway?

~~~
tempestn
Yes, but for that reason I always prefer when things use ctrl as a modifier
instead of alt. So I wouldn't want to do more alting.

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lispm
As a Lisp implementation Emacs Lisp was pretty primitive then:

    
    
        * primitive GC
        * only dynamic binding (Stallman sold that as a feature)
        * no nested functions
        * no threads
        * no object system
        * no namespaces for symbols
        * implementation not independent from the editor
        * no TCO
        * slow
    

On the positive side it already had a simple byte code interpreter with a
compiler for it and it was fast enough for some editing. Also, dedicated Emacs
Lisp users managed to write some amazing code - given the restrictions.

The 'eight megabytes and constantly swapping' thing now is also of less
importance. ;-)

~~~
bitdiddle
Emacs, imho, will get a whole lot better when it runs on Guile[1]. This was a
great presentation. I've been using emacs since the mid-eighties, it's so
easily programmable that hackers are always hacking new things for it, so it
keeps up with the latest fashion.

[1] [http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-
user/2013-07/msg0006...](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-
user/2013-07/msg00065.html)

~~~
aryastark
Not sure about that. Guile is pretty old and messy itself. It's still my
preferred Scheme, though. But that's mostly just because of familiarity and
loyalty on my part.

There is already Edwin, which comes with MIT-Scheme. It's Emacs written in
Scheme. It never took off, and most don't even know about it.

~~~
rml
I love Edwin! It's my favorite Emacs implementation, even though I don't get
to use it as much as I'd like. It even has a nice email client, IMAIL, written
using a beautiful object-oriented style. Many years of Scheme wizardry lives
in there, I need to spend more time studying it.

------
blacktulip
Someone told me this is called "Takahashi method"[1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method)

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jff
Ah, that explains Ruby's concurrency situation.

(It's a joke, I understand the difficulty involved with concurrency in
interpreted languages. But given that both Elisp and Ruby are well-known for
having trouble with threading, well, too hard to pass up!)

~~~
btilly
Actually there is nothing about interpreted languages which makes concurrency
particularly difficult other than their history.

As an extreme example, you can run Erlang as an interpreted language and
concurrency will not be a problem.

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systems
i think people are being too harsh on this presentation, and focused too much
on the form factor and number of slides , instead of the actual content and
message

i like the human factor in it, like how random and incidental stuff like being
able to complete ruby-mode.el had such a high impact on ruby's syntax

and how learning a text editor inside out, eventually led to ruby, which let
to RoR , most people would consider learning so much about emacs as a waste of
time, for matz it helped him made ruby

this presentation is more about our human nature , this is i believe a great
exmaple of when doing what you love is more important that doing whats
important or what you think is right, i like it

------
davexunit
Matz gave this presentation at LibrePlanet 2012 in Boston. This talk was _the_
reaason that I decided to give Emacs a shot after being a Vim user for a
couple of years. I have used Emacs every day since.

I talked briefly with Matz afterwards and he was very friendly and pleasant to
chat with.

There should be audio of this presentation to go along with the slides
somewhere, but I couldn't quickly locate it.

~~~
blacktulip
How do you feel about emacs? I am a long time vim user too. I want to hear
some testimonies before investing in emacs.

~~~
davexunit
I love Emacs. I'm much happier now that I live in Emacs. I work on a Ruby on
Rails application at work and I use Emacs not only to write code but to run
tests, use the rails console, use the MySQL console, bundle update, use git,
etc.

Let's not forget the amount of customization possible with Emacs Lisp. Editing
your editor is a pretty great experience. If you work with any other Lisps,
Emacs is _the_ editor to use.

I don't read my email in Emacs like some people, but I do use it for IRC and
it works quite well.

I could "evangelize" more, but I've done enough. Give it a shot. Figure out
which editor you like more. If you stick with Emacs, be prepared for a weird
adjustment period where your hands get really confused and you start mixing up
Vim and Emacs key bindings. :)

~~~
Derbasti
Couldn't have said it better.

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tel
The fact the Ruby syntax was mostly derived by what could be made to have
auto-indentation in regex in a week in emacslisp is interesting. More than
that, it's interesting that Matz seems to ascribe a lot of Ruby's success to
it.

    
    
        If I couldn't make ruby-mode to work the syntax of 
        Ruby would have changed to more C-like one too 
        similar to other scripting languages as a result, 
        Ruby would not have gained current popularity
    

I've heard that Ruby's parsing code is especially difficult to replicate.

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davecyen
Self admittedly, I'm a newb at coding but I've tried emacs and am not a fan. I
get the benefits of being able to debug and execute code immediately in the
REPL, but I would much rather write code in sublime text or any other text
editor. The last thing I want to do when I'm writing code is try to remember
some obscure combination of keys in order to perform a simple backspace or
copy and paste a line of code. Have not been convinced otherwise yet, maybe
someone here can better enlighten me

~~~
tincholio
>The last thing I want to do when I'm writing code is try to remember some
obscure combination of keys in order to perform a simple backspace or copy and
paste a line of code.

That makes me think that you really haven't tried Emacs. Backspace is just
backspace. Copying and pasting is not too different than what you'd use in
other software (but it can be, in many awesome ways). Do the tutorial, start
using it daily, focus on the stuff you really need. The rest comes along on
its own.

~~~
xentronium
> Backspace is just backspace

Unless you're on the wrong terminal. (google "emacs fix backspace")

Besides, it's really a big deal that most applications in your system use one
set of hotkeys, while bash and emacs use a totally different one.

~~~
claudius
What other applications are there on a system but Bash and Emacs? :P

Besides, you can tell GTK to use Emacs-y keybindings rather than the
‘standard’ C-v, C-x, C-c.

~~~
pjmlp
> What other applications are there on a system but Bash and Emacs? :P

I remember the days when it was just sh/ksh and vi in any commercial UNIX
flavor.

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mathattack
It's hard to go bad on this article given the source, no?

I find it more interesting for insight into Matz than anything about emacs.
The idea that his text editor got him excited about programming is pretty
powerful. Yes it could have been written in a 1 page memo, but who cares?

~~~
hannibal5
Calling emacs text editor is huge understatement.

~~~
mathattack
I meant it with some irony. As in, "What appears to be a mere text editor..."

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gneis
Anyone know if the Emacs source code still is a "good read"? …or has it grown
too much

~~~
justinhj
I read the emacs lisp code quite often. It's very nicely documented and easy
to read in general.

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gkya
Is there a video of this presentation somewhere? Would love to see it.

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oskarkv
He says he understood the power of Lisp, yet he made a non-Lisp language. :P I
don't get people who make non-Lisp languages.

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jfinub
'then i started using ruby' _subconsciously presses >>_ 'thank you.'

~~~
btilly
You misunderstood what he meant by, _I started Ruby development._

That's the creator of the Ruby language. That's when he started developing it.

~~~
diadara
it's you, who misunderstood him

------
Lapsa
vim is amazing indeed. changed my life too.

~~~
hannibal5

        "Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?"
        "Because we use vi, son. They use emacs."

------
mirsadm
That was really really annoying and pointless. Why has this been up voted?

~~~
clicks
Because it's a poetic, hacker'ish celebration of something that all --err,
_some_ of us love so dearly.

~~~
jff
Writing a single sentence fragment per slide for 75 slides does not make
poetry.

~~~
pavanky
You have to realize he was probably talking about each of those points. Slides
don't translate well into reading.

