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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 12th, 2023

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  • Treasure every single byte of memory? Who are you, Jeremiah?

    I notice you often cite obscurities like the OOM killer to throw off your cross-examiners, a cheap courtroom ploy. The OOM killer code is utter garbage written during the Blandy days and never tested. Not that I mind as no non-trivial application recovers gracefully from OOM.

    Interesting how you’re a purist when it comes to cl-lib, and an absolute maniac when coding basic C.



  • Remember the last must-have ide? Atom. Gone.

    You’ve confused active development with source code availability. Atom is just as open to improvements as emacs is. The difference is the number of programmers reading atom’s support channel is determined by how much they’re getting paid by microsoft whereas those reading emacs’s is determined by how long they can go without employment. I won’t say which camp contains the better programmers. I will say I never got past my first-round interview at Microsoft.



  • It’s the always-on REPL that’s the kicker.

    (defun invert-case ()
      (backward-delete-char-untabify 1)
      (insert (funcall (if (< last-command-event ?a)
    		       #'downcase
    		     #'upcase)
    		   last-command-event)))
    
    (add-hook 'post-self-insert-hook #'invert-case)
    

    Then C-u C-M-x on invert-case to convey the larger point that emacs is always running within a gdb-like harness. Your buddy will immediately bristle at the prohibitive investment necessary to achieve this pointless and trivial hack, at which point he’ll have truly grokked emacs.








  • Even if things weren’t broken now, they will be in a couple months. If you take the fragility of emacs to its logical conclusion as I have, you end up writing emacs instead of writing software.

    Diddling python is but an intermediary phase to non-coding management, but diddle you must to prove you’ve been in the trenches. Alas many a doughboy fell under emacs’s hypnotic spell and never poked their heads out to see the war’s been long over.






  • For this old timer, emacs achieved nirvana with version 19.34 (hilit19 anyone?), when RMS and his merry men retook the crown from the Lucid pretenders. The 19 series were like the last of the air-cooled Porsche 911’s contemporaneously in vogue. Things stabilized with versions 20 and 21, then languished until some pretty lousy but well meaning programmers revitalized development in 2008.