[Novalug] Unix

Mark Smith mark@winksmith.com
Tue Oct 25 20:22:03 EDT 2011


ahh... but real programmers use TECO and i quote.  My preemptive apologies
to women out there reading this who might be offended... i'm just quoting
what Ed Post from a story written in 1983:

	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.

	It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely
	resembles transmission line noise than readable text[4]. One of
	the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your
	name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just
	about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will
	probably destroy your program, or even worse-- introduce subtle
	and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.

thanks for reminding me about that essay.  It's a brilliant piece of work:

	http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 05:44:44PM -0500, Andrew Scott Beals wrote:
> Or go for JOVE, which nets you the power of emacs with the memory footprint and speed of vi.  Real vi, not that memory-hog vim thing.  Even runs on a PDP-11!
> 
> On Oct 25, 2011, at 5:16 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> > the difference between micro-emacs and emacs is that it's notably missing
> > the global-thermo-nuclear-war option, but that's okay, because i didn't
> > use it much anyway.
> > 
> > On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 11:31:16AM -0400, David Sachdev wrote:
> >> And emacs is a great operating system....if they had only remembered to
> >> include an editor

-- 
Mark Smith
mark@winksmith.com
mark@tux.org



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