[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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