Famous Emacs Users (that are not famous for using Emacs)

http://wenshanren.org/?p=418

by Meatball_py • 13 years ago

130 82 13 years ago

wenshanren.org

jf3• 13 years ago

Neal Stephenson is missing from this list: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NealStephenson

vilhelm_s• 13 years ago

And Vernor Vinge (http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...).

AimHere• 13 years ago

Eben Moglen is also not there - sure he's now a Stallman collaborator and involved with the FSF, but he is 'just' a lawyer and/or law professor - yet in one of his earliest contacts with RMS, he apparently already claimed to use emacs every day.

jf3• 13 years ago

Whitfield Diffie is also an Emacs user. I once sat behind him at an awards ceremony and was able to observe him hacking on Emacs lisp during the event. That was the highlight of my month.

omaranto2• 13 years ago

What does hacking ON Emacs lisp mean? Does it mean working on Emacs's lisp interpreter's source? Or on some project written in Emacs lisp?

stettix• 13 years ago

Yes, that's exactly what he was doing when one time I approached him to sign my copy of his book!

lispython• 13 years ago

Neal Stephenson is in the original list, but he is switched to Scrivener now. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-steph...

parennoob• 13 years ago

Josh Nimoy, because he uses emacs and got it into Tron http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178

csmatt• 13 years ago

Somehow missed that. I love how many geekster eggs were in that movie!

shardling• 13 years ago

Speaking of sf/fantasy authors, Steve Brust writes using emacs.

(And on mandrake linux, according to the acknowledgements of this unpublished work: http://dreamcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/My-Own-Kind-...)

justin66• 13 years ago

Jack Chalker sited Framemaker and Borland Sprint as favorites because of their EMACS-like features: http://web.archive.org/web/19990819062835/http://jackchalker...

Sprint's a real member of the EMACS family tree but I don't know about Framemaker.

stevekemp• 13 years ago

Yes I saw in the foreword/afterword in one of his recent books a credit for somebody helping him with Emacs Macros.

I was disappointed we didn't know what kind of macros they were.

zach• 13 years ago

Also, Ken Jennings writes his weekly trivia challenge in Emacs:

http://www.ken-jennings.com/messageboards/viewtopic.php?p=12...

That's maybe not the ideal endorsement, though. Ken is a great guy, but having the trivia champion of the world saying he is an enthusiastic Emacs user... well, it doesn't improve Emacs' reputation as an editor for lovers of the esoteric.

unknownian• 13 years ago

Decently surprising list, at least for me. I think the Torvalds-Stallman relationship got more complicated in my head.

kroger• 13 years ago

To be fair, Linus uses uemacs. He says "real" emacs is the tool of the devil ;-)

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+LinusTorvalds/posts/iySKQGtkmtb

adestefan• 13 years ago

And the last line of the last commit to his uemacs repo is, "I really should just learn another editor, rather than continue to polish this turd."

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/diff/?i...

kabdib2• 13 years ago

I'm happy to use Emacs. I'm also perfectly comfortable to personally and professionally dislike RMS.

e3pi• 13 years ago

I'm also perfectly comfortable to personally and professionally dislike RMS.

Why?

You do know of course, the innocent spirit of this dear man was traumatized at MIT's lab due to closed source proprietary commercializing --before, but around the time of-- Symbolics grabbing and zipping up Macsyma, or, ...something like that?

chrisallick• 13 years ago

Most Famous: The hacker from http://books.google.com/books/about/CUCKOO_S_EGG.html?id=0q1... hahaha.

hk__22• 13 years ago

Does anybody has the same list with vi?

Watabou• 13 years ago

Vim not vi.

Or does anyone actually use vi?

meepmorp3• 13 years ago

Or does anyone actually use vi?

Folks working on machines without vim who don't have root.

Source: an 18 month consulting gig several years ago.

yfefyf2• 13 years ago

Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html

hk__22• 13 years ago

I wrote "Vim", then edited my comment to make it generic: vi, Vim, elvis, nvi, etc.

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

Richard Stallman – the creator of GNU Emacs, the founder of GNU

Did anybody think he was secretly using vi in the closet?

rthomas6• 13 years ago

I still think he is. He's too productive not to be.

unimpressive• 13 years ago

It's probably a lot easier to learn emacs when you implement it.

foobarbazqux2• 13 years ago

RMS hasn't built anything in ages! (As far as I know.)

ezy• 13 years ago

How are RMS & JWZ not famous for using emacs? I was expecting more people outside of the usual computer science & industry suspects.

michaelhoffman• 13 years ago

I agree, several of those people are famous in large part because of their contributions to Emacs.

_delirium• 13 years ago

Isn't JWZ mainly famous for Netscape (and later the DNA Lounge)? I didn't know he had anything to do with Emacs until I Googled to see what that was about.

ryanwatkins• 13 years ago

Isn't JWZ mainly famous for Netscape (and later the DNA Lounge)?

Depends on when you were born.

fsck--off• 13 years ago

I find it strange that Daniel Weinreb, Guy Steele and Richard Stallman are on this list. Steele co-wrote ?macs with David Moon and John Kulp. Dan Weinreb was a beta tester on ?macs before Stallman joined the project, and he would later become the first one to write an Emacs in a lisp (EINE). Stallman, of course, created GNU Emacs. Putting them on a list with Assange and Zuckerberg is ridiculous.

tzs• 13 years ago

It's a list of people who are (1) famous AND (2) Emacs users AND who would still be famous if they were not Emacs users. Weinreb, Steele, and Stallman all fit this.

Also, you make it sound like Stallman wasn't involved in Emacs from the start. In fact, Stallman and Steele wrote the FIRST Emacs. Everyone else you named came after.

momo-reina• 13 years ago

The E in Emacs was contributed by Stallman, this was when he had already joined the project. Previously, the project had another name and other hackers were involved.

"Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says he attracted Stallman's attention.

"He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing," recalls Steele.

For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it.

"As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.

The project's new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman.[1]

I think Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel, also talks a little about this in one of the interviews.

[1] Free as in Freedom

baby4• 13 years ago

Sadly the amount of resource to learn emacs is pretty sparse while it is not for vim.

Also emacs doesn't run properly on windows (at least not on an azerty keyboard)

daat4182• 13 years ago

Not one of your statements are true. In fact, everything you just said is 100% bullshit.

baby4• 13 years ago

Well those are my problems, I've been trying to get into Emacs for a pretty long time and have no gave up to use Sublime. But if I'm in a terminal I'll use Emacs, inefficiently but this is my go to.

mickeyp• 13 years ago

Hello,

I run the blog mastering emacs - please let me know if there are any articles you want me to cover.

baby4• 13 years ago

how to run emacs with an azerty keyboard on windows would be one :)

neonscribe• 13 years ago

Sadly, Dan Weinreb died almost a year ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Weinreb

hmart2• 13 years ago

James Gosling still uses Emacs?

hmart2• 13 years ago

Ooops http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/207799/don_t_use_ema...

bhaak• 13 years ago

He proposes NetBeans over Emacs. I can understand this, if you want to write Java code (I prefer Eclipse [which of course has Emacs keybindings], but that is another issue).

But NetBeans for anything but Java? I don't think so.

"While NetBeans is open source, Gosling said almost nobody bothers to modify its code because of its complexity."

Isn't this terrible for an Open Source project? Emacs still has tons of commits by various developers. Is there at least a healthy community producing plugins for NetBeans?

codex• 13 years ago

What's funny is that none of these people are actually working software engineers, at least anymore. Even Linus doesn't write much code. Perhaps that's a consequence of being famous, or necessary to be famous. But it also allows the counter-argument that Emacs has been supplanted by newer editors by active practitioners.

kzrdude• 13 years ago

Not famous. Because they are managers or otherwise in senior roles.

j_m_b• 13 years ago

I never saw a picture of Stallman so young.

ekianjo• 13 years ago

There are videos on youtube from his early carrier - with a beard but looking young as well.

kabdib2• 13 years ago

Many of the "programmer heavies" at MS used Epsilon (an Emacs clone with quite good Windows integration). To be fair, a lot of them also used vim. Notably, few of them liked Visual Studio all that much.

outworlder2• 13 years ago

Maybe that's why previous versions of Visual Studio came with Emacs keybindings by default?

Unfortunately, the latest VS is missing those.

yfefyf2• 13 years ago

Many of them are famous Lisp programmers. Of course, Lisp grogrammers use Emacs.

wglb2• 13 years ago

Mostly; Paul Graham being an exception.

RRRA• 13 years ago

This is mostly news because of RMS' photo without a beard :D

saraid216• 13 years ago

Is there a list of emacs users who are famous for using emacs?

S4M• 13 years ago

Steve Yegge?

Meatball_py• 13 years ago

There is a list on the EmacsWiki

imdhmd• 13 years ago

very confusing title

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

Aaaaaaah. Social Proof.

:-)

kevin818• 13 years ago

Could someone explain what program Mark used in The Social Network movie when he was viewing the traffic for facemash.com? I've never seen that kind of clean logging before - at least not for php/apache. http://i0.wp.com/wenshanren.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/w...

donniezazen• 13 years ago

I wonder what Linux distribution he used.

wglb2• 13 years ago

Even though Linus is on this list, it is for using MicroEMACS, which is really not very close to Emacs. Same keybindings, yes, but significantly smaller editor. Certainly less powerful than most any version of VI.

I have MicroEMACS running on my HP200lx.

Disclaimer: I worked with Dave Conroy, the author of MicroEMACS for a short while.

Famous Emacs Users (that are not famous for using Emacs)

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