> as a preserved island of fun and "hacking for the sake of it"
Somehow this sentiment is anything but fun to me. Emacs is the last bastion of a different path down the tree of personal computing than the one our species took, one in which individual users are empowered and not - as is now the case - held hostage by us[0] in our ivory towers of impenetrable layers of cryptic technology.
Emacs was made for humans to use as a real tool. Barely anything else in the tech world really qualifies to the same degree. I'd love to peek into the parallel universe where we stuck to introspectable, malleable software and ended up with something closer to the Houyhnhnm computing stack[1]. Alas, for now that ship has sailed.
See also: That old story about Emacs at Amazon, etc.
Somehow this sentiment is anything but fun to me. Emacs is the last bastion of a different path down the tree of personal computing than the one our species took, one in which individual users are empowered and not - as is now the case - held hostage by us[0] in our ivory towers of impenetrable layers of cryptic technology.
Emacs was made for humans to use as a real tool. Barely anything else in the tech world really qualifies to the same degree. I'd love to peek into the parallel universe where we stuck to introspectable, malleable software and ended up with something closer to the Houyhnhnm computing stack[1]. Alas, for now that ship has sailed.
See also: That old story about Emacs at Amazon, etc.
[0]: "tech people"
[1]: https://ngnghm.github.io/