[Novalug] vi vs. emacs was Re: OT List?

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Thu Sep 24 20:29:19 EDT 2009


Well, other than trashing kids for playing Video Games (after all Real 
Programmers play Pinball), it was a Stupid Article then (OK, Pascal was 
NEVER any good, and Wirth doesn't live up to his name, but the C 
Language was quite old at that time) and it's even stupider today.

I amaze people when I tell them that Cobol is a better language than 
Fortran. Why? Because it has Real Data Structures and Fortran has only 
arrays.

What is actually Cool about TECO is that it is really a Virtual Machine, 
where the Source Code is exactly the same as the Binary Object Code.

Heck, I wrote a program that took read DEC Cross Compiler Object Files, 
converted them to S-Records, and sent them to the PROM Burner in TECO 
Macros.

Back in those days, TECO and APL were about the Most Fun You Could Have 
with computers!

I never saw a DEC-10 or DEC-20, but I saw scads of PDP-11's, which 
bacame DoD's Standard Minicomputer, and lots of different microprocessors.

JIM

Kevin Cole wrote:
> Historical footnote:
> 
> In 1980, the DECsystem-10 I was working on (which was running TOPS-10)
> had emacs. Well, "FINE" really, which was a port of emacs with a
> tribute to RMS's love of recursive acronyms: Fine Is Not Emacs.  It
> did not have vi.  That's not to say vi wasn't available; merely that
> as far as I knew, it wasn't around, and FINE as the only full-screen
> editor available on the system I used beat the crap out of the
> existing competition of the day (the "Text Editor and COrrector",
> TECO, and "Son Of Stopgap", SOS).
> 
> If you think emacs is an OS in search of an editor, you haven't met
> TECO. ;-) A quote from "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal"
> 
> http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html
> 
> | ...
> | Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into
> | editors running on more reasonably named operating systems-- EMACS
> | and VI being two. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers
> | consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in
> | Text Editors as it is in Women. No, the Real Programmer wants a "you
> | asked for it, you got it" text editor-- complicated, cryptic, powerful,
> | unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.
> 
> 
> 
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