Comments on: Not for everyone

By: Personal organization software — The Endeavour

Personal organization software — The Endeavour — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:39:23 +0000

[...] Emacs another try Forced to be simple Not for everyone Software that gets used ? [...]

By: John V.

John V. — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:09:51 +0000

Back when I still had all my teeth and color in my hair I learned EMACS because it was fully funtional on a VT-100 and could be split into multiple buffers, essentially multiple windows you could switch between. Each buffer (window for you youngsters) could edit a file, or run a shell, or run an interpreter, or do email, etc. all at the same time, and all in one session.

For all you fellow old fogies, a bit of nostalgia:

# cat > > ~luser/.cshrc alias vi 'rm \!*;unalias vi;grep -v BoZo ~/.cshrc > ~/.z; mv -f ~/.z ~/.cshrc' ^D

By: Edward Kmett

Edward Kmett — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:29:04 +0000

I program in Haskell because it is fun. I’ll admit though, I learned it for much the same reason the Carper justifies his learning of emacs — because it was fun to tinker around with, and was a source of wonderfully abstract ideas. I’ll definitely be adopting the ‘building a car in your garage’ analogy, when explaining my motivations in the future! If nothing else, it is far more convincing than a 60 second spiel about monads, side-effects and concurrency.

By: Thomas Guest

Thomas Guest — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 15:47:36 +0000

And some people would rather build their own tools than actually use them. I can identify with Terence Parr's motto:

"Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating?"

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 15:04:24 +0000

I didn’t learn Emacs with the goal of being productive. I learned it for the same reason some people build cars in their garages, while most people just buy a one and drive it to and from work every day. … For me, productivity was a beneficial side-effect.

My reasoning was similar. I realized I didn’t have a good general-purpose, scriptable editor, and I could see some obvious choices. I chose Emacs not because it was obviously the best, but because it was old and lispy, sounded like loads of fun, and real hackers use it — I’d like to get there someday, and it seems like a good way to learn is to imitate real hackers. I could see that Emacs would do most of what I figured I might need, and added to the above, that satisfied me.

By: Tweets that mention Not for everyone — The Endeavour -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention Not for everyone — The Endeavour -- Topsy.com — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:51:55 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by John D. Cook, Chas Emerick. Chas Emerick said: RT @JohnDCook: New post: Not for everyone http://bit.ly/bW37C1 dispassionately evaluating tools [...]

By: Dimitris Leventeas

Dimitris Leventeas — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:45:56 +0000

> For instance, I’ve heard several people say they were burned out on programming until they discovered Perl or Ruby.

True for me. That’s why I love Python.