Emacs used as a message router in Germany's ATC systems in the 1990s (2021)
emacswiki.org
emacswiki.org
Edit: spelling
I remember how in ~1997 at a science camp we used Turbo Pascal under DOS for most programming labs, and whenever pascal code was run on Linux machines we used p2c translator and compiled the resulting C code.
Zmacs -> Emacs, Zmail -> Rmail (or Gnus), Symbolics Document Examiner -> Info, Lisp Machine Lisp -> Emacs Lisp (both children of Maclisp). There may be other examples that I'm not aware of.
GNU Emacs might have started as an editor, but it's certainly grown beyond that. Maybe its become a sort of Valinor, a realm for uprooted Lisp machine users to continue the craft.
Hence the old joke: "Emacs sure is a great operating system, pity it's missing a good text editor"
It has also inspired "Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail" (Zawinski worked on both XEmacs and Netscape...)
But a common pattern was that the systems majorly used with Emacs as the keybindings evolved all had mirrored bucky bits which means instead of using left pinky finger for Control key when hitting C-x C-f many would use right thumb for Control and left hand for X and F.
And so there's nothing virtuously ergonomic about the vim keybindings and people who try to make it seem like there's some UX genius there (and to be fair, also with emacs) are often involved in a rather elitist game of retcon.
Emacs at least evolved on systems that had much richer keyboards, and with the deliberate intent to make use of those extra keys but also make it possible for people to just muck with it and make it whatever they wanted.
In the late 80s, early 90s when I got my start on Unix... I specifically chose emacs over vi because it let me use exotic novelties like... arrow keys.
To use the left pinky on those keyboards for left Control, you would have to leave the home row completely, and shit your wrists awkwardly....
RMAIL, info, etc predate Lisp Machines (ZMacs and EINE have their roots in ITS/TECO Emacs) by quite a bit. They where standard on ITS long before the Lisp Machine came about, and that is really from where GNU Emacs draws much if not most of its inspiration.
and i understand this is extremely difficult to fix
I use emacs for many programming languages. However, when it came to .NET development (at work) - I had to stick with Visual Studio. I always toyed the idea of Visual Studio Code but, due to some of the projects, it was not easy to do when we were using .NET Framework. Once we were getting closer to .NET Core, however, I knew emacs was becomming a possibility.
My work colleagues see "emacs" on one of my screens at work. They are puzzled why I use it to generate code or do git, etc, with it - but rarely ask questions.
One thing I was surprised about, when we finally moved away from .NET framework to .NET Core (.NET 6 and later) -- I was surprised when one member of the team said he was planning to switch from using Visual Studio.. the IDE, to Visual Studio Code.
I asked why and he said is just likes it behaving more as a text editor than a full development environment. Of course, I understood what he meant by that.
Its weird, especially in microsoft stack land, to hear a .NET developer say this. Truth is -- many seem to be moving to Visual Studio Code. It had to take another Microsoft product to do that, considering we always had vi/vim, emacs, or others like sublime text, etc. Before Visual Studio Code, if I dare mention using a text editor for a .NET project, I would have been given all sorts of puzzled faces. How times change.
Today... while most are still using Visual Studio (IDE).. we now have 2 developers using Visual Studio Code. As for me... I am using:- eglot, company, yasnipet, flycheck, etc... EMACS+Omnisharp!
I even wrote functions to easily create new solutions, projects, unit tests, etc.
Programming is enjoyable with emacs. It makes me happy.
For git I prefer the command line.
I don't think there's right or wrong, use whatever tool makes you comfortable and productive.
At the end of the day - use what you want to get it done! I have no issues with that.
It's not about the "text editor". It's about the LSP and implementations for it. Like it or not, before LSP, code intelligence tooling was quite bad in the "text editor" land (except for some tools like clangd or jedi). Today it's a bliss to use a performante, small footprint editor and offload code intelligence. Although, IDE-lover users swear that their IDE's built-in code intelligence is superior (which, in some cases, is objectively true).
Thanks to Microsoft, I guess. Thanks to the FOSS world for the implementations, too.
We created a clangd-based setup with remote indexes so that our developers can open their editor (vim / vscode) and within 10 seconds they get access to full code intelligence on the 20M+ SLOC monorepo. This is unimaginable with CLion, where developers have to scope down their "view" on the monorepo to a handful of directories, and still wait half an hour for the indexing to happen
My understanding is that 20M+ SLOC is not even considered a super large code base, though, when it comes to those "textbook" monorepo examples (urban legends?)
I'm reminded of the much more positive story from Steve Yegge about a customer service system at Amazon that used Emacs as its UI. Apparently the customer-service reps loved it, and missed using Emacs when the transition was made to an all-new Java app.
https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel
(C-f "When Amazon got its start")
(I don't necessarily no-sell all that boosterism, either. The most basal ancestor of today's GNU Emacs dates to the mid-1970s; if the 'Lindy effect' holds true, it really is the 100-year editor.)
Text input is so much faster, and of you're typing a lot, keyboard <-> mouse movements slow you down.
I worked for a subsidiary of Capgemini, German ATC system as well, a couple years later, and I'd have welcomed a message router in undocumented elisp. It would've been a very clear step up.
I once used excel & vba as an intranet webserver to collect weekly business analytics using user input into web forms from various departments.
A very little knowledge, no proper resourcing, no support, internal politics determined the effort should fail came together to produce such a "success"
Got a seedy story like that? Seedier than that? Let's hear it!
I wrote a Perl script for a client to provide CSV records as results to search queries sent by the main application, a custom tool in Microsoft Access my friend had created.
We managed to convince the client to install the Perl script on IIS on some shitty little Windows NT box they had. There was no cloud, and no web services hype yet. Linux was still an experiment for college kids to work with... Windows NT was the future of enterprise servers that did real work.
Anyhoo, our crappy little "web service" did the job. The client's sales personnel were able to upload, search for, and retrieve the process analyses they used to sell new equipment to their customers.
Ah, the 90s. I also wrote a tool to catch people setting up remote dialins so a) they had internet from home b) could share those links with friends to grab stuff from the products server. It ran on Linux and used a network sniffer to catch people.
ITG was crazy!
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=EmacsStorie...
"Message router" usually involves understanding higher level entities - In this case, it would understand that a given type of message with given information needs to be forwarded to X, Y, and Z.
DCE was "Distributed Computing Environment", and provided among other things RPC system that is still used by MS Windows NT and DCOM. In this case it was easier to make all parts of the system first talk TCP/IP, then use DCE to provide glue code between divergent environments.
I didn't know about emacs and the customer support thing -- will look it up and read it.
I believe it was reading his site (a number of years ago, might I add) that convinced me to swap my LCTRL with CAPS on my keyboard. Best decision.. ever!
Now my pinky has been much more comfortable ever since!
Of course, my co-workers hate it that I have swapped keys. They forget about and wonder why capital letters are not working, or trying to copy/cut/paste. lol.
On windows, I use to update the registry directly. Today, I use PowerToys... so I can just close it if someone else uses my keyboard.
Anyway -- diverting the topic a little.
+1 to Mr Steve Yegge!
> hn sux, pjals is probably in love with autione. niggers all.
If there are any emacs wiki admins reading this, you might want to look into correcting this.
-- EDIT -- I reached out to #emacs on librechat and it has been reverted.
It was a peaceful revolution. Wende is a term coined by the SED and misleading.
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprachkritik-wer-wende-sagt-s... (in german tho)
Wende means turnaround and that’s good enough for the rest of us.
But today I learned that Hungarian is a Uralic not a Slavic language and so of course I had no chance discerning which word in «rendszerváltás» stood for system or change, which made me mad enough to want to look it up:
rendszer (“system”) + váltás (“change”)
Seems like adding -szer turns the meaning of the word into its enabler.
I checked on Wiktionary and this nice theory is not right; váltás has been traced back to Proto-Finno-Ugric roots and has known cognates in other distant Uralic languages. Oh well! At least we live in a miraculous time where one can easily check etymologies in various language families in five seconds. :-)
But amusingly, "revolution" itself also literally etymologically means ... turn!
"Revolution" also means "turnaround".
It’s been a common word, which existed long before 1989, and while it is since then strongly linked to the events around the time when the Berlin wall fell, you’ll have a hard time finding a German who knows of how this word was used by the East-German political party (SED).
Spoiler: It was used to mean the opposite of what actually happened (i.e. more power to the party).
The parent comment’s link brings you to the transcript of an interview with a former German law professor who, knowing the SED’s usage of the word, made sure to always describe what happened in 1989 as a revolution.
This is actually one person begging other German speakers to start using what he thinks is the correct word.
Ain’t gonna happen.
If East-Germans stood up for themselves in the required numbers to overthrow their leaders, I guess Germans would use the word revolution.
But that’s not what transpired.
In 1989 a system collapsed. Communism. While that may also always qualify as a revolution in academic circles, German people chose Wende, which simply means turnaround.
Sure, but for something not directly related: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wende_(Bundesrepublik_Deutschl...
(might be dating myself there ;-}
VMS could be way more solid than whatever was cobbled in Unix (outside expensive niche implementations) but over time Unix would grow and grow while VMS was limited in users and platforms. [1]
Digital selling off some of the software packages they used to provide with VMS only made for quicker demise.
[1] This is also oft-forgotten reason why Oracle got so widespread in enterprises - you could get Oracle with most features on most platforms, even if some were more blessed than others. It might run slower than packages optimized for given platform (think DB2 on S/390, Rdb on VMS) but it would be mostly the same database whether you connected to development server on PC, some department's VAX Cluster, or your recent acquisition's IBM Mainframe.