OLD Editor history

Continuing the discussion from Are you using vim or emacs or something else?:

Without a doubt, Emacs can lead to wasting time, but it can also lead to the creation of new programs and tools to get the job done.

There are Emacs modes and Emacs Lisp scripts that allow Emacs to use key bindings very similar to Vi and Vim. For those who used Digital Equipment WPS+, EDT, or TPU/EVE, there have been .el files that provide very good, cross platform emulation of these editors and more.

I mentioned TECO in another post. TECO was a powerful, but very weird editor from the early minicomputer days. Some of the early TECO macros led to the creation of Emacs - a historical tidbit. Long ago, Emacs could consume resources on old machines, but these days even ten year old computers work fine with any of these editors; it’s just a matter of preference, taste, old versus new, simple vs. powerful, etc. and ultimately it’s about choice.

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The only problem I have with Emacs, and this is an absolute dealbreaker for me, is the fact that Emacs is built around Lisp.

I find Lisp’s syntax to be absolutely disgusting, all dialects, without exception. All those nested parenthesis within parenthesis within parenthesis are an absolute nightmare. And prefix operators? Were the authors of Lisp so incompetent to implement a Recursive Descent Parser to deal with expressions like a < b? No, in Lisp, you have to write it like ((( < a b ))) or some rubbish like that.

Reading Lisp code is like reading a poorly written research paper in set theory, the author of which didn’t know how to use LATEX properly, and also didn’t have full command of the language in which the paper was written… AND was pretty bad as a mathematician. That’s how a Lisp program looks to me. It’s a bad concept.

I would prefer Emacs be built on top of C, the language with the most beautiful syntax of all.

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