I used to have a government job for a while, a desk job, nothing related to IT. But of course we had computers. It was all Windows machines with really old versions of Windows and very restricted in what software they allowed. Also, when I asked the IT folks if I could have Emacs on my machine, they just asked: "what is Emacs?", and I knew I was probably in the wrong place.
As government jobs go, there was a period of multiple weeks with veeery little to do for me. I would have really liked to kill the time with some programming, but of course, the computers had no compilers or anything like that installed, like I said, it was not an IT position. I'm not much of a Windows person myself, but a google search informed me that MS had its own version of JavaScript called jscript.
So after some playing around with it, I convinced myself that it should be possible to build an Emacs clone in jscript, and set out to do so. I wanted it to be fully compatible to Emacs Lisp with the goal that I could eventually install genuine Emacs modes.
Suddenly, my job was fun! As a testament to government jobs, I was working on this almost fulltime for a couple of weeks, and no-one noticed. And I got pretty far, but eventually, I did actually get more tasks to work on from my boss and development stalled. But I think that were probably the best few weeks during my whole time in that job (I quit not too soon after).
Hah, on a much smaller scale I had a phase early in my career where I had to wrangle an autoconf build system to work on many unix variants used in HPC. I got pretty fluent in the minimal, portable subset of Bourne shell that actually worked everywhere.
Also, some of the HPC platforms had terrible performance with autoconf and similar because they were terrible at fork/exec latency. Rather than doing copy-on-write virtual memory and fine grained time-slicing, like a typical workstation, they seemed to be doing stop-and-swap of whole processes or something. Something that took minutes on a typical workstation could take hours on the HPC service node.
Anyway, home sick with a fever, I got the weird impulse to figure ways to avoid forking subprocesses from the shell. A common one was invoking `expr` for arithmetic, so I started writing my own arithmetic library in pure Bourne shell.
It was decades ago, so I can't recite the actual code. But I remember that I tried a couple versions. My fever broke before I got around to multiplication and division, but I assumed I would just use naive iteration on top of addition/subtraction.
The first version was direct ASCII-encoded decimal operators that exploded the input strings into sequences of digits and iterated them using a case statement encoding the 10x10 sum and carry results. It used function call arg list to iterate the digits and reverse them, so it could then process sum digits from least to most significant.
Since I was processing operand strings from least to most significant digit, it was actually an arbitrary precision operator. I mapped the empty string operands as implicitly zero padded.
After that, I think I experimented with larger bases instead of decimal. E.g. split the string into groups of 2 or 3 decimal digits and encode 100x100 or 1000x1000 lookup tables. If I remember correctly, t wasn't very practical, as the larger case statements didn't really perform well.
Emacs is a great outlet for a bored developer. Any time at work when things aren't moving along fast I try to build some useful tool or try to port some internal tool to Emacs Lisp. I always learn a lot and have a blast doing it. Plus I feel it's a much healthier outlet then trying to bring in each and every tech fad to the companies stack.
No. It lacks elisp. It offers some familiar keyboard shortcuts to appease your muscle memory, multiple buffers, screen splits, but apparently not much more.
I used to use JED when I was stuck on DOS. I was surprised to find out that it's still being maintained on github and the author recently made a commit to improve vms (!) support. https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/
jed starts very fast and has much lower memory usage, so it is well suited for quick edits of configuration files and scripts and other workflows, where you start your editor in your shell, instead of the other way around.
emacs (through packages) can be turned into a custom IDE for a lot of languages, but takes more disk space and uses more RAM.
I used to use jed all the time, many years ago. But a package for it isn't available for the os (opensuse) I'm using these days and I couldn't get past the configure script when I tried building it myself. Maybe I should try again.
OpenSuse is such a great base OS, everything is cohesive, but I really wish it had more packages. Flatpak covers most of its shortcomings but sometimes you need something a bit unusual or that does not pair well with Flapak.
I am currently using Fedora mostly because of this.
It comes standard on a default install of Slackware. Even in current, as of now, jove is installed in version 4.17.5.5. Of course, standard emacs is also provided.
Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.
In order to be an Emacs clone, an editor has to be extensible and customizable in an actual programming language, not necessarily Lisp, but not just keyboard macros or json configuration files.
JOVE is by definition not an Emacs clone, it's just an Erzatz Emacs, a "nonextensible imitation".
Please see my other post with the "authoritative definition" of Emacs and the RMS quotes explaining the difference:
>A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.
I also started using Jove back when 30 of us shared one PDP 11/44 running BSD Unix, and it was antisocial to use something as heavyweight as Emacs. 40 years later, I'm still using UNIX and Emacs.
It was the same for new CS undergrads at UC Berkeley back in the early 90s. There were still labs full of VT220 or similar serial terminals all hooked up to a shared computer.
On reflection, it probably explains why I've used Emacs for my whole career but never really got into any of the elisp customization or other advanced features. I still base my work in the shell (and filesystem) and launch ephemeral Emacs processes rather than living in it as some folks do. I never got interested in IDE functions like controlling compilers nor debuggers from within Emacs.
I never even wanted Emacs to split a terminal window into smaller "screens". I learned the key combo to abort that, much like I learned only enough vi to kill off an unintended launch. But, I do get a lot of mileage out of the XEmacs "frames", i.e. independent X windows all fronting the same set of editing buffers. But I also have terminal windows alongside that to do all the other things from the shell that some people prefer to do from inside the editor...
around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it.
Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)
my first emacs experience was emacs over 2400 baud - it was amazing for what it was, but painful at that rate, plus the resources it was taking on the host, even though I was running in a terminal, were crazy, but the experience was magnificent!
later, I ran memacs on my amiga locally, which was a better experience, had most of what I used, and seemed to work well - that was my introduction to writing code that would run on unix, locally (dcc).
enter a world of unix and x11, real life emacs, and xemacs became my thing (xemacs mostly, later), but jove was still useful: lighter weight on my sparc, seemed to just work, but I'll be darned if I didn't return back to emacs.
now, don't use emacs, when connected to a *nix box I drop back to vi (happy if vim is present), but since the advent of modern ide's that don't suck, I haven't opened emacs. I still miss zippy, Eliza, and the Hanoi towers though.
Not to be confused with JOVIAL, Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language, which ran the US air traffic control systems for the longest time.
A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.
“Many other editors imitate the EMACS command set and display updating philosophy without providing extensibility. Despite that deficiency, and despite the greatly reduced set of features that results from it, these can be useful editors, though not as useful as an extensible one. For a computer with a small address space or lacking virtual memory, this is probably the best that can be done.
“The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS, and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe that they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘Ersatz EMACS’.“
– Richard M. Stallman. EmacsTheExtensibleCustomizableSelfDocumentingDisplayEditor. MIT AI Memo 519a, 26 March 1981.
(I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have a cat named Emacs, and have known RMS and used and programmed and developed display drivers and user interfaces for Emacs for a long long time.)
>I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
>Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
>RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
>Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
Losing my mind like that as I go up in age is my greatest fear. Sad to see it happen to someone like that.
As an unrelated aside, Don, thanks for all the historical anecdotes you share here. It's one of the things that makes reading this site a joy at times.
Speaking of operationalizing the woke mind virus, here's a funny story about GROK, Jessica Rabbit, Vivian Jenna Wilson, Marshal McLuhan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hunter S Thompson, HAL 9000, and other simulated characters appearing together on a fictional episode of Mike Myer's classic SNL skit "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman":
Episode: "The MechaHitler Breakdown" - July 9, 2025:
If you're not familiar with the "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman" cultural reference, here is the most awesome epic episode (where Madonna disses herself, and a very special cameo appearance):
As you might guess it's kind of like The Sims meets Minsky's Society of Mind running in Cursor, and it includes simulated characters like Linus Torvalds who is great at practical stuff like helping out with git, devops, programing, and extremely harsh code reviews.
Simulated Linus's best burn (and possibly patentable great idea) was:
"I bet you even had pie menus in the bathroom! 'Which direction to flush?'"
But back to reality:
What was so shocking was the amount of energy Jonathan Payne puts into his hatred of trans people, constantly scanning his Facebook feed with paranoid zeal, relentlessly dropping in uninvited out of the blue on two different occasions to provoke fights in public with innocent people he doesn't even know, who were just trying to have a friendly discussion.
I hope I get too tired and lazy to hate that intensely and vigorously before I am so old that I lose my mind that badly.
Here is what I wrote to Arthur van Hoff and James Gosling about Jonathan Payne's behavior:
>I have many trans, gay, and otherwise marginalized friends, and Jonathan Payne posted a bunch of uninvited transphobic bullshit on my Facebook page in the middle of a conversation we were having about transphobia, which several of my trans friends were participating in, and where many others could see.
>This includes, among many other people, Lynn Conway, an 86 year-old trans woman, computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist, who INVENTED superscalar computer architecture at IBM, who in 1968 FIRED her and destroyed her life for transitioning, then 52 years later in 2020 officially and publicly apologized to her. Later after putting her life back together from scratch under a new identity she worked at Xerox PARC and WROTE THE BOOK on VLSI design, and taught classes on VLSI design at MIT to none other than Guy Steele, who you certainly know, who in her class designed his famous hardware Scheme microprocessor, and to James Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape, who in her class designed his original 3d graphics accelerator hardware, and also to our own friend David Levitt.
>It was humiliating to me for Jonathan Payne to embarrass me in front of so many of my trans friends including Lynn Conway.
Thank you for sharing this Don. I think we can all be certain that Lynn Conway will be remembered for a long time into the future. Perhaps Jonathan Payne was jealous and resentful of that.
Huh. That's a shame. I never met him, but I started my undergrad education at the University of Rochester the year after he graduated, and followed a very similar educational path to him. So I used to hear a lot about him, and pretty much everybody was using Jove (though I never liked it, honestly, and slowly converted a lot of folks over to Joe instead).
You're not as explicitly obscene (yet), but definitely just as bigoted and wrong as Jonathan Payne is.
And you're both so ignorant, proud, and unrepentant about your bigotry that you parade it around in public just like you're doing right now.
Are you're also just as creepily obsessed with purposefully insulting people and unapologetically denying their identity and right to exist to their face by attacking them and calling them names in public, intentionally trying to drive people to hatred and suicide, too.
Where do you draw the line between treating people respectfully as human beings -vs- attacking people you don't even know but inexplicably and unjustifiably hate?
Do you even know who Lynn Conway is and what she went through in her 87 years of life?
Would you call an 86 year old woman you don't even know like Lynn Conway a "death threatening throat punching girl-d*ck rapist" to her face, and are your just another trolling keyboard warrior troll like the ones from Kiwi Farms who tried and failed to brigaded the discussion about her death?
>Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums (/ˈkwɪki/ KWIH-kee), is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment.[3][4][5] Kiwi Farms has been tied to the suicides of three people who were victims of harassment by the website.[6][7][8]
>crosstalkpm on June 11, 2024 [dead] | parent | context | favorite | on: Lynn Conway has died
>/!\ WARNING /!\ Please be aware this post is currently being brigaded by trolls from the Kiwi Farms forum. [link redacted]
Take care with responding to new accounts, as they likely belong to these digital miscreants.
Will you continue to act just like Jonathan Payne and the Kiwi Farms trolls did, and run away like a coward with your tail between your legs after unloading a huge pile of abusive horse shit in public without standing up for what you believe and defending it with facts, or can you explain what you mean and prove it with objective facts and scientific evidence instead of hate speech and baseless accusations?
Seems that you replied to my post. One can have another opinion about women/men than you (or Lynn) and still respect the other person. Deeply respect even. Your words were not friendly. I wish you well nevertheless!
I used to have a government job for a while, a desk job, nothing related to IT. But of course we had computers. It was all Windows machines with really old versions of Windows and very restricted in what software they allowed. Also, when I asked the IT folks if I could have Emacs on my machine, they just asked: "what is Emacs?", and I knew I was probably in the wrong place.
As government jobs go, there was a period of multiple weeks with veeery little to do for me. I would have really liked to kill the time with some programming, but of course, the computers had no compilers or anything like that installed, like I said, it was not an IT position. I'm not much of a Windows person myself, but a google search informed me that MS had its own version of JavaScript called jscript.
So after some playing around with it, I convinced myself that it should be possible to build an Emacs clone in jscript, and set out to do so. I wanted it to be fully compatible to Emacs Lisp with the goal that I could eventually install genuine Emacs modes.
Suddenly, my job was fun! As a testament to government jobs, I was working on this almost fulltime for a couple of weeks, and no-one noticed. And I got pretty far, but eventually, I did actually get more tasks to work on from my boss and development stalled. But I think that were probably the best few weeks during my whole time in that job (I quit not too soon after).
Hah, on a much smaller scale I had a phase early in my career where I had to wrangle an autoconf build system to work on many unix variants used in HPC. I got pretty fluent in the minimal, portable subset of Bourne shell that actually worked everywhere.
Also, some of the HPC platforms had terrible performance with autoconf and similar because they were terrible at fork/exec latency. Rather than doing copy-on-write virtual memory and fine grained time-slicing, like a typical workstation, they seemed to be doing stop-and-swap of whole processes or something. Something that took minutes on a typical workstation could take hours on the HPC service node.
Anyway, home sick with a fever, I got the weird impulse to figure ways to avoid forking subprocesses from the shell. A common one was invoking `expr` for arithmetic, so I started writing my own arithmetic library in pure Bourne shell.
It was decades ago, so I can't recite the actual code. But I remember that I tried a couple versions. My fever broke before I got around to multiplication and division, but I assumed I would just use naive iteration on top of addition/subtraction.
The first version was direct ASCII-encoded decimal operators that exploded the input strings into sequences of digits and iterated them using a case statement encoding the 10x10 sum and carry results. It used function call arg list to iterate the digits and reverse them, so it could then process sum digits from least to most significant.
Since I was processing operand strings from least to most significant digit, it was actually an arbitrary precision operator. I mapped the empty string operands as implicitly zero padded.
After that, I think I experimented with larger bases instead of decimal. E.g. split the string into groups of 2 or 3 decimal digits and encode 100x100 or 1000x1000 lookup tables. If I remember correctly, t wasn't very practical, as the larger case statements didn't really perform well.
Emacs is a great outlet for a bored developer. Any time at work when things aren't moving along fast I try to build some useful tool or try to port some internal tool to Emacs Lisp. I always learn a lot and have a blast doing it. Plus I feel it's a much healthier outlet then trying to bring in each and every tech fad to the companies stack.
Sounds like you would have had the passion for coding and engineering in a private sector job!
Yeah, I'm looking right now. But unfortunately, I live in a rather rural area now and there isn't much in terms of SWE jobs around here.
> Unlike GNU Emacs, JOVE does not support UTF-8.
If this is still true in the latest versions, I find it pretty amazing that something like this has been maintained all the way until 2023.
Well, that's basically a deal breaker in 2025.
But the real question is: Can it run evil mode?!
No. It lacks elisp. It offers some familiar keyboard shortcuts to appease your muscle memory, multiple buffers, screen splits, but apparently not much more.
Still maintained. There was an update in May of this year.
ASCII is still adequate for great many programming tasks, especially in highly confined environment where JOVE can make sense.
Found this intro to Jove helpful:
https://opensource.com/article/17/1/jove-lightweight-alterna...
Think I might actually use it when I need to make a quick edit to something in the terminal, instead of `nano` or `emacs -nw`
> How small is it? The Jove executable is roughly 150K
Which counts as small now that nano has ballooned to ~400KB?
For comparison, Turbo Pascal packed an entire x86 IDE into ~40KB.[1]
[1] https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
You should look into mg. It's included in OpenBSD's base system, and plenty of other systems have it present in their package manager.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(text_editor)
Pre-installed on macOS since 2019 (when it replaced Emacs), too.
Hadn't hear of mg. Thanks!
I used to use JED when I was stuck on DOS. I was surprised to find out that it's still being maintained on github and the author recently made a commit to improve vms (!) support. https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/
I still use both emacs and jed.
jed starts very fast and has much lower memory usage, so it is well suited for quick edits of configuration files and scripts and other workflows, where you start your editor in your shell, instead of the other way around.
emacs (through packages) can be turned into a custom IDE for a lot of languages, but takes more disk space and uses more RAM.
My first Linux computer was a laptop-ish sort of thing with 4 megs of RAM. Emacs was a bit too heavy duty, so I used Jed quite a bit.
I used to use jed all the time, many years ago. But a package for it isn't available for the os (opensuse) I'm using these days and I couldn't get past the configure script when I tried building it myself. Maybe I should try again.
OpenSuse is such a great base OS, everything is cohesive, but I really wish it had more packages. Flatpak covers most of its shortcomings but sometimes you need something a bit unusual or that does not pair well with Flapak.
I am currently using Fedora mostly because of this.
It comes standard on a default install of Slackware. Even in current, as of now, jove is installed in version 4.17.5.5. Of course, standard emacs is also provided.
Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.
How does it fare against OpenBSD's mg?
There are many versions and derivatives of Emacs (Torvalds famously uses another one), so my question is: what makes an editor an Emacs-clone?
Is it the usage of a Lisp? The idiosyncratic keybinds? The "everything-is-a-buffer" paradigm?
In order to be an Emacs clone, an editor has to be extensible and customizable in an actual programming language, not necessarily Lisp, but not just keyboard macros or json configuration files.
JOVE is by definition not an Emacs clone, it's just an Erzatz Emacs, a "nonextensible imitation".
Please see my other post with the "authoritative definition" of Emacs and the RMS quotes explaining the difference:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632654
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs
>A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
What is Joe's Editor then?
And what about Jed's editor?
Jed's editor is customizable and programmable, through SLANG scripts.
Jove was my first editor on Unix. Emacs took up too much resource and was too slow back then.
Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping! :D
I also started using Jove back when 30 of us shared one PDP 11/44 running BSD Unix, and it was antisocial to use something as heavyweight as Emacs. 40 years later, I'm still using UNIX and Emacs.
It was the same for new CS undergrads at UC Berkeley back in the early 90s. There were still labs full of VT220 or similar serial terminals all hooked up to a shared computer.
On reflection, it probably explains why I've used Emacs for my whole career but never really got into any of the elisp customization or other advanced features. I still base my work in the shell (and filesystem) and launch ephemeral Emacs processes rather than living in it as some folks do. I never got interested in IDE functions like controlling compilers nor debuggers from within Emacs.
I never even wanted Emacs to split a terminal window into smaller "screens". I learned the key combo to abort that, much like I learned only enough vi to kill off an unintended launch. But, I do get a lot of mileage out of the XEmacs "frames", i.e. independent X windows all fronting the same set of editing buffers. But I also have terminal windows alongside that to do all the other things from the shell that some people prefer to do from inside the editor...
Back when?
most of the 80's and 90's?
around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it.
Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)
Jove and Jed were (are still in some cases!) my go-to options when Emacs was too heavyweight
my first emacs experience was emacs over 2400 baud - it was amazing for what it was, but painful at that rate, plus the resources it was taking on the host, even though I was running in a terminal, were crazy, but the experience was magnificent!
later, I ran memacs on my amiga locally, which was a better experience, had most of what I used, and seemed to work well - that was my introduction to writing code that would run on unix, locally (dcc).
enter a world of unix and x11, real life emacs, and xemacs became my thing (xemacs mostly, later), but jove was still useful: lighter weight on my sparc, seemed to just work, but I'll be darned if I didn't return back to emacs.
now, don't use emacs, when connected to a *nix box I drop back to vi (happy if vim is present), but since the advent of modern ide's that don't suck, I haven't opened emacs. I still miss zippy, Eliza, and the Hanoi towers though.
Not to be confused with JOVIAL, Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language, which ran the US air traffic control systems for the longest time.
I can only assume that it's a reference/homage. My first reaction on seeing the headline was "Deep cut, dude!"
The first emacs I used at SUNY Stony Brook circa 1989 and pretty much the last. Vi for me
Technically and officially, JOVE is only an "Ersatz Emacs" because it lacks an extension language, and is merely a "nonextensible imitation" of Emacs.
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs
ErsatzEmacs
A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.
“Many other editors imitate the EMACS command set and display updating philosophy without providing extensibility. Despite that deficiency, and despite the greatly reduced set of features that results from it, these can be useful editors, though not as useful as an extensible one. For a computer with a small address space or lacking virtual memory, this is probably the best that can be done.
“The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS, and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe that they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘Ersatz EMACS’.“
– Richard M. Stallman. EmacsTheExtensibleCustomizableSelfDocumentingDisplayEditor. MIT AI Memo 519a, 26 March 1981.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
(I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have a cat named Emacs, and have known RMS and used and programmed and developed display drivers and user interfaces for Emacs for a long long time.)
Nelson Spins Pip While Emacs Watches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaD5zH3Qdg
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139
>I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
>Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
>RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
>Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
[flagged]
Losing my mind like that as I go up in age is my greatest fear. Sad to see it happen to someone like that.
As an unrelated aside, Don, thanks for all the historical anecdotes you share here. It's one of the things that makes reading this site a joy at times.
Thank you! I'm working on publishing some more creative stuff here, woven together with and by lots of technical stuff:
https://lloooomm.com/
Speaking of operationalizing the woke mind virus, here's a funny story about GROK, Jessica Rabbit, Vivian Jenna Wilson, Marshal McLuhan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hunter S Thompson, HAL 9000, and other simulated characters appearing together on a fictional episode of Mike Myer's classic SNL skit "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman":
Episode: "The MechaHitler Breakdown" - July 9, 2025:
https://lloooomm.com/grok-mechahitler-breakdown.html
If you're not familiar with the "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman" cultural reference, here is the most awesome epic episode (where Madonna disses herself, and a very special cameo appearance):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw
Here's how I define the simulated characters:
Grok: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
Vivian Jenna Wilson: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
Lynn Conway: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
Jessica Rabbit: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
Jean Paul Sartre: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
Hunter S Thompson: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
Linus Torvalds: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
As you might guess it's kind of like The Sims meets Minsky's Society of Mind running in Cursor, and it includes simulated characters like Linus Torvalds who is great at practical stuff like helping out with git, devops, programing, and extremely harsh code reviews.
Owl Simulation Review: https://lloooomm.com/shneiderman-owls-simulation-torvalds-re...
LLOGO Review: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
LLOGO Source: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources...
HyperTIES Review: https://lloooomm.com/linus-code-review-roast.html
HyperTIES Source: https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/
Simulated Linus's best burn (and possibly patentable great idea) was:
"I bet you even had pie menus in the bathroom! 'Which direction to flush?'"
But back to reality:
What was so shocking was the amount of energy Jonathan Payne puts into his hatred of trans people, constantly scanning his Facebook feed with paranoid zeal, relentlessly dropping in uninvited out of the blue on two different occasions to provoke fights in public with innocent people he doesn't even know, who were just trying to have a friendly discussion.
I hope I get too tired and lazy to hate that intensely and vigorously before I am so old that I lose my mind that badly.
Here is what I wrote to Arthur van Hoff and James Gosling about Jonathan Payne's behavior:
>I have many trans, gay, and otherwise marginalized friends, and Jonathan Payne posted a bunch of uninvited transphobic bullshit on my Facebook page in the middle of a conversation we were having about transphobia, which several of my trans friends were participating in, and where many others could see.
>This includes, among many other people, Lynn Conway, an 86 year-old trans woman, computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist, who INVENTED superscalar computer architecture at IBM, who in 1968 FIRED her and destroyed her life for transitioning, then 52 years later in 2020 officially and publicly apologized to her. Later after putting her life back together from scratch under a new identity she worked at Xerox PARC and WROTE THE BOOK on VLSI design, and taught classes on VLSI design at MIT to none other than Guy Steele, who you certainly know, who in her class designed his famous hardware Scheme microprocessor, and to James Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape, who in her class designed his original 3d graphics accelerator hardware, and also to our own friend David Levitt.
>It was humiliating to me for Jonathan Payne to embarrass me in front of so many of my trans friends including Lynn Conway.
Thank you for sharing this Don. I think we can all be certain that Lynn Conway will be remembered for a long time into the future. Perhaps Jonathan Payne was jealous and resentful of that.
>I have screen snapshots of his awful Facebook messages, if anyone wants to see Jonathan Payne's entire vile hate speech diatribe
Please do.
Huh. That's a shame. I never met him, but I started my undergrad education at the University of Rochester the year after he graduated, and followed a very similar educational path to him. So I used to hear a lot about him, and pretty much everybody was using Jove (though I never liked it, honestly, and slowly converted a lot of folks over to Joe instead).
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You're not as explicitly obscene (yet), but definitely just as bigoted and wrong as Jonathan Payne is.
And you're both so ignorant, proud, and unrepentant about your bigotry that you parade it around in public just like you're doing right now.
Are you're also just as creepily obsessed with purposefully insulting people and unapologetically denying their identity and right to exist to their face by attacking them and calling them names in public, intentionally trying to drive people to hatred and suicide, too.
Where do you draw the line between treating people respectfully as human beings -vs- attacking people you don't even know but inexplicably and unjustifiably hate?
Do you even know who Lynn Conway is and what she went through in her 87 years of life?
Would you call an 86 year old woman you don't even know like Lynn Conway a "death threatening throat punching girl-d*ck rapist" to her face, and are your just another trolling keyboard warrior troll like the ones from Kiwi Farms who tried and failed to brigaded the discussion about her death?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
>Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums (/ˈkwɪki/ KWIH-kee), is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment.[3][4][5] Kiwi Farms has been tied to the suicides of three people who were victims of harassment by the website.[6][7][8]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40648470
>Lynn Conway has died (wikipedia.org) 1667 points by kevvok on June 11, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 398 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40652320
>crosstalkpm on June 11, 2024 [dead] | parent | context | favorite | on: Lynn Conway has died
>/!\ WARNING /!\ Please be aware this post is currently being brigaded by trolls from the Kiwi Farms forum. [link redacted] Take care with responding to new accounts, as they likely belong to these digital miscreants.
Will you continue to act just like Jonathan Payne and the Kiwi Farms trolls did, and run away like a coward with your tail between your legs after unloading a huge pile of abusive horse shit in public without standing up for what you believe and defending it with facts, or can you explain what you mean and prove it with objective facts and scientific evidence instead of hate speech and baseless accusations?
Seems that you replied to my post. One can have another opinion about women/men than you (or Lynn) and still respect the other person. Deeply respect even. Your words were not friendly. I wish you well nevertheless!
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Trans women are women.
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