Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel (2004)

informatimago.com

178 pointsIvoah62 comments

In concept it kinda reminds me of Oberon (I wish those had succeeded) though the integration between the kernel and the language (elisp) isn't anything like as tight.

For anyone who hasn't seen it (and a chance to look at the path not taken).

https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon1992.pdf

Link to the second (2013) edition: http://www.projectoberon.com/

Neat, I'd forgotten about that, there is also this http://oberonstation.x10.mx/ which I keep getting tempted by.

I thought your comparison w/ Emacs was apt.

When analysed as an interactive application Oberon makes me think the most Acme, then Emacs. I'm struggling with defining the genuine distinctions between operating system, application server and applications.

It seems the distinction has to do with boundaries and how they are enforced, and by whom (I.e. the amount of user control one has on factors such as security, isolation in contrast to the application writer)

> When analysed as an interactive application Oberon makes me think the most Acme, then Emacs.

Rob Pike borrowed the UI/UX of Acme from Oberon: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html

IMO the Oberon/Acme text-based command approach suffers all of the problems of Unix shells, which are caused by lack of type information. Symbolics Genera's Dynamic Windows used the mouse in a similar way to Oberon but with actions guided by type information, concepts which can be found today in the Common Lisp Interface Manager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager). There are Emacs modes like SLIME that do similar things and are widely used.

>I'm struggling with defining the genuine distinctions between operating system, application server and applications.

Two important concepts are abstraction as you go up the stack (towards the application) and generalisation of functionality as you go down (towards the OS).

FWIW Emacs now has support for C modules in version 25, so tighter integration is possible

It's appropriate to call this at least GNU/Linux, right?

Yes, though I'd rather this run on OpenBSD's kernel. I'd want all two of my softwares to span the GPL/BSD divide.

Nah, NetBSD. Let's see how many obscure architectures can run Emacs OS!

Linux supports more architectures than NetBSD apparently.

There's also always this, which I found pretty cool and somewhat functional as well, though it goes beyong the bare "emacs on a kernel" concept:

http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager....

I one had a VM at a workplace where all I had were outdated hardware specs and outdated versions of Windows with few administrative privileges. It helped to retain some sanity. For some time.

PJB has become a bit (too little for my taste) of a persona non grata in the common lisp world (which has a large overlap with the emacs world) ever since it was suggested and so far not disproved (names match, nicknames match) that he's the person behind https://twitter.com/ogamita

edit: To make it more precise, full names are identical and http://www.informatimago.com/index.html links to http://pjb.ogamita.org which uses the same name (ogamita) as that twitter account.

I dislike holocaust-deniers as much as the next guy, but I find it troubling that one's political opinions should prevent us from considering a person's work in a distinct domain. This is especially true in the present case: I see no evidence that PJB has crossed the Hitler stream with the common lisp stream.

People can be smart and respectable in one domain and stupid in another.

This is especially important to keep in mind because there is no way to shun a person and change their mind on the opinion that led to their shunning. Only engagement does that.

There are two sides to this and I think they're important to distinguish: If the person in question was wrongfully accused, this could do undeserved damage to him. This would be a misfortune (albeit not a great one given how little activity my comment generated) but I'm currently sufficiently convinced this won't happen that I went ahead and posted the comment.

The other matter is rehabilitation. Whether he should be allowed to apologise at some point, say that he made a mistake, and be welcomed back, is something that you cannot decide for everyone. It's up to your personal beliefs, in particular your religion. Everybody needs to determine that for him- or herself, in my opinion.

A person can be smart in one domain and stupid in another, so much is clear (think Grothendieck in maths and politics)

But a person cannot be both respectable and disrespectable at the same time, I find, although I'm afraid now we might be disagreeing rather about words than ideas. Respectability, to me, is a compliment to somebody's set of values.

I agree, but the point was rather about censorship.

I find it troubling that we should censor (explicitly or otherwise) someone on accounts of his respectability. I find this especially true when the source of disrespectability stems from an unrelated topic.

On the other hand, the influence that people have tends to be blind to how they previously acquired that influence. It's a very common problem in politics: you put power on someone due to their credentials in one area, and they suddenly have power they don't deserve in a completely different domain.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V7me25aNtI

That's totally missing the point.

We can both condemn the stupid/wrong behavior and celebrate the intellectual achievements. The point is that we shouldn't hold back our praise of the latter on account of the former.

This is a typical false-dichotomy that plagues contemporary discourse around social justice and various *isms.

I don't agree. Many wouldn't.

Hardly an argument, though.

If we abided by your reasoning, the US wouldn't have a space program.

What's there to argue about? You think you're right and I think you're wrong.

Because his retweeting the hitler glorifying documentary ? Did he talk about holocaust or revisionism online ?

Please scroll further. I understand that some of it is French but you should notice rather quickly nonetheless that this did not just happen on a single occasion. Essentially everything he writes fits into the narrative of #whitegenocide

I did dig in his tweets quite a lot, found many retweets of this pro-hitler account, also French extreme right parties, among normal right wing tweets. But all are retweets, no written ones, no debate, no long trolling. I also searched on google for mention of his nicks with hitler | holocaust | denier | ... and found nothing. If he did express disturbing views he did this on non indexed platforms.

I am surprised because I spent a lot of times on irc near lisp related (scheme, guile, emacs, so strictly speaking no CL, CLOS, lisp) channels and never heard bad mentions about him. Now I agree that this twitter account seems quite linked and probably pjb, but I can't decide anything based on just that.

His projects were removed from quicklisp in September (see e.g. http://blog.quicklisp.org/2016/09/september-2016-quicklisp-d...) over this matter.

That's a bit more telling. Are there any discussions on a mailing list ? or was is on irc and now lost ?

Please start with this log entry

> 2016-09-29T23:57:32Z Xach: I dropped com.informatimago because I do not want to have to discuss anything with pjb again. I have never enjoyed discussing anything previously, but his vile twitter feed drove me over the edge, and his project no longer builds, so I don't want to report problems or discuss solutions.

from here: http://ccl.clozure.com/irc-logs/lisp/lisp-2016-09.txt

on comp.lang.lisp he called the concentration camps 'a details in the history of WWII' and 'Then they killed in these camps less people than for example the International Socialists of the URSS and China, by two order of magnitudes!'

I see, classic French racist troll over historical statistics. Sad.

Ah, same guy as the one with probably the most infamous comp.lang.lisp post ever https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/iKNvs...

Hm, I wonder if there's something similar to what's happened with Terry A. Davis, author of what's been renamed to TempleOS [1]. He became schizophrenic, and has become less and less coherent over time. He used to have an account here, but either I can't remember it or it's been deleted: most of his posts were of the vile variety.

There was an extensive profile of him on Motherboard [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

[2] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer

You don't need to have a mental illness to be extreme right like https://twitter.com/ogamita seems to be.

Thank you for this post. I had technical interaction with him in the past, and read many of his technical posts. But I did not know this. I will no longer interact with him.

"ogamita" is an obvious palindrome of the "atimago" suffix of "informatimago".

Wouldn't it be better to port emacs to includeOS?

includeOS + guile + guile-emacs

It's a nice operating system but someone needs to port a decent text editor.

Never mind, you can always execute an instance of vim from your emacs shell.

spacemacs ;)

To clarify this gnomic reply: http://spacemacs.org/ it's sort of a modal emacs with live keybinding display.

And it integrates many "vimisms" via evil-mode. I'd been a vim user for a long time but was increasingly dissatisfied as I got deeper into extending it. I've found the opposite of emacs (especially with spacemacs) almost a year into the "conversion".

One example that I've come around with was an initial extreme distaste of dynamic binding/non-lexical scope, from a PL standpoint of writing robust software.

But it's also super nice for incremental, interactive development.

Having tried spacemacs, I bounced back to vim. Even though vim is just a tiny bit more responsive, it's enough to make emacs feel laggy. Granted, I use extensions very lightly, so I'm not feeling the qualitative difference of being able to do something in spacemacs that's impossible in vim.

What do you mean laggy? In the response time when typing or the time to start a new instance of emacs? If it's the first did you try emacs -q to check that you don't have something strange in you setup. If it's the latter, did you check out emacs --daemon ?

I did give emacs --daemon a try, and that definitely helped with the long startup time. I went so far as to alias vim to emacsclient -t. But what I mean when I say it was laggy is that typing and cursor movement are ever so slightly less responsive. Not MS Word on Windows 3.0 laggy, just enough for me to notice the difference. I dug into it a little bit with spacemacs and vim open side by side, and according to top, spacemacs was using about 10x the CPU of vim.

I tried spacemacs for a while but I got tired of fighting all the little idiosyncratic differences from real vi. Trying to replicate a sophisticated interface like that, especially one that allows the buildup of muscle memory, is always going to be a fraught problem. It's the Anna Karenina principle [0]:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

Somone should port emacs to boot directly from the BIOS :)

Imagine writing drivers in elisp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

You can include it in coreboot.

someone did: evil-mode

Systemdemacs will take care of that.

You could make an llvm backend that outputs elisp and then build vim with it :)

At least today they could have used yet another kernel for this. That would hurd more.

What's that saying? Emacs is a great OS it just needs a good text editor?

I always thought it was the other way around ... ఠ_ఠ