That's maybe not the ideal endorsement, though. Ken is a great guy, but having the trivia champion of the world saying he is an enthusiastic Emacs user... well, it doesn't improve Emacs' reputation as an editor for lovers of the esoteric.
Whitfield Diffie is also an Emacs user. I once sat behind him at an awards ceremony and was able to observe him hacking on Emacs lisp during the event. That was the highlight of my month.
Yes. After the event was over, I asked him what he had been working on, it was some code to identify what sort of buffer he had just opened (secure v. insecure, I don't remember the details)
Eben Moglen is also not there - sure he's now a Stallman collaborator and involved with the FSF, but he is 'just' a lawyer and/or law professor - yet in one of his earliest contacts with RMS, he apparently already claimed to use emacs every day.
I meant new projects. I just wouldn't describe him as "too productive" now, not compared to the early days. Unlike that other lovable teddy bear, Linus. RMS has even written about his shift out of development IIRC, about how political work is more important to him now.
Isn't JWZ mainly famous for Netscape (and later the DNA Lounge)? I didn't know he had anything to do with Emacs until I Googled to see what that was about.
I find it strange that Daniel Weinreb, Guy Steele and Richard Stallman are on this list. Steele co-wrote ?macs with David Moon and John Kulp. Dan Weinreb was a beta tester on ?macs before Stallman joined the project, and he would later become the first one to write an Emacs in a lisp (EINE). Stallman, of course, created GNU Emacs. Putting them on a list with Assange and Zuckerberg is ridiculous.
It's a list of people who are (1) famous AND (2) Emacs users AND who would still be famous if they were not Emacs users. Weinreb, Steele, and Stallman all fit this.
Also, you make it sound like Stallman wasn't involved in Emacs from the start. In fact, Stallman and Steele wrote the FIRST Emacs. Everyone else you named came after.
The E in Emacs was contributed by Stallman, this was when he had already joined the project. Previously, the project had another name and other hackers were involved.
"Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says he attracted Stallman's attention.
"He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing," recalls Steele.
For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it.
"As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.
The project's new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman.[1]
I think Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel, also talks a little about this in one of the interviews.
Many of the "programmer heavies" at MS used Epsilon (an Emacs clone with quite good Windows integration). To be fair, a lot of them also used vim. Notably, few of them liked Visual Studio all that much.
What's funny is that none of these people are actually working software engineers, at least anymore. Even Linus doesn't write much code. Perhaps that's a consequence of being famous, or necessary to be famous. But it also allows the counter-argument that Emacs has been supplanted by newer editors by active practitioners.
They usually have one of the many clones of vi, installed as vi. Very few use actual vi, because for many years it was out-of-bounds because it used AT&T code from ed.
I encounter vi on a production Solaris 10 box at my current consulting gig.
I can access the box from other hosts with tramp. I believe that firewall rules will be changed to restrict many production SSH connections to be outbound, which might signal the end of that use case(?)
Other editors found on the production box: ed, xedit (X Consortium).
Could someone explain what program Mark used in The Social Network movie when he was viewing the traffic for facemash.com? I've never seen that kind of clean logging before - at least not for php/apache. http://i0.wp.com/wenshanren.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/w...
Even though Linus is on this list, it is for using MicroEMACS, which is really not very close to Emacs. Same keybindings, yes, but significantly smaller editor. Certainly less powerful than most any version of VI.
I have MicroEMACS running on my HP200lx.
Disclaimer: I worked with Dave Conroy, the author of MicroEMACS for a short while.
>I'm also perfectly comfortable to personally and professionally dislike RMS.
Why?
You do know of course, the innocent spirit of this dear man was traumatized at MIT's lab due to closed source proprietary commercializing --before, but around the time of-- Symbolics grabbing and zipping up Macsyma, or, ...something like that?
He proposes NetBeans over Emacs. I can understand this, if you want to write Java code (I prefer Eclipse [which of course has Emacs keybindings], but that is another issue).
But NetBeans for anything but Java? I don't think so.
"While NetBeans is open source, Gosling said almost nobody bothers to modify its code because of its complexity."
Isn't this terrible for an Open Source project? Emacs still has tons of commits by various developers. Is there at least a healthy community producing plugins for NetBeans?
Well those are my problems, I've been trying to get into Emacs for a pretty long time and have no gave up to use Sublime. But if I'm in a terminal I'll use Emacs, inefficiently but this is my go to.
