"Another lie in this essay is that it was Bernie Greenberg who discovered that Lisp was a good language in which to write Emacs. In fact, I wrote the first Emacs in Lisp, for the Lisp machine, a fact of which Stallman is completely aware. It was afterwards that my close friend Bernie, who was one of the other Symbolics founders, wrote Multics Emacs."
"And while IaEURXm setting the record straight, the original (TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established as the standard text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance."
Of everything in the article this, if accurate, is the most disappointing to me. I've always thought about RMS that, regardless of what you think of his political views on software, the guy who wrote Emacs must be a great hacker.
Although, even if all he accomplished was keeping Emacs free (FSF sense), that's still something. If Emacs had gone proprietary at some point, it surely would have disappeared by now.
Am I overreacting here? Is Weinreb downplaying Stallman's part in creating Emacs? Pretty much all software builds on previous software in one way or another, and maybe Stallman took the Emacs that Weinreb describes and made it into something much greater.
"And while IaEURXm setting the record straight, the original (TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established as the standard text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance."
Of everything in the article this, if accurate, is the most disappointing to me. I've always thought about RMS that, regardless of what you think of his political views on software, the guy who wrote Emacs must be a great hacker.
Although, even if all he accomplished was keeping Emacs free (FSF sense), that's still something. If Emacs had gone proprietary at some point, it surely would have disappeared by now.
Am I overreacting here? Is Weinreb downplaying Stallman's part in creating Emacs? Pretty much all software builds on previous software in one way or another, and maybe Stallman took the Emacs that Weinreb describes and made it into something much greater.
Can anyone fill in the blanks for me?