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points by gumby 1 day ago | 0 comments

I started using Emacs at the AI lab in 1978. It's still my main development tool and probably still the program I spend most of my time in today.

[–] DonHopkins 1 day ago

I named my cat Emacs, and he's only three years old. His sister's name is Pip.

And to answer the question I get a lot: no, it would be morally reprehensible to name a cat after an inferior editor such as "vi".

[–] frantathefranta 1 day ago

I can only imagine that Pip is an orange cat with typical orange cat characteristics like being crazy and breaking things occasionally.

[–] DonHopkins 1 day ago

You are correct: Nominative and chromatic determinism strikes again!

Emacs is a powerful, flexible, majestic, extensible silver tabby, so he also acts like his namesake: textual and functional determinism.

[–] schoen 1 day ago

I often thought that a cat could be named /bin/cat. After all, many cats seem to enjoy being in boxes or bins!

[–] kragen 1 day ago

You're likely aware of this, and certainly Don is, but for those unaware, PIP was the RSX-11 and CP/M equivalent to /bin/cat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program

[–] DonHopkins 1 day ago

I'm going to name my next cat after my favorite Apple ][ DOS command:

]CATALOG

And my next dog after the way you warm restart DOS after you hit RESET with Integer Basic ROMs and get thrown into Woz's system monitor:

*3D0G

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS#Technical_details

[–] jsrcout 1 day ago

Awesome. I wasn't sure if anyone else remembered those. Formative stuff for me :-)

[–] kragen 8 hours ago

Probably most of the people who used them a lot at the time would be 55–70-year-old men in the US today. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html suggests that 88% of US men who would be 55 if they were still alive are in fact still alive, and 72% of US men who would be 70 today if they were still alive are in fact still alive.

So probably three-quarters of the people who remembered them in, say, 01990, still remember them. You remember all those guys, and the occasional gal, you saw at computer stores and user group meetings at the time? Most of them are still alive, and most of them still remember them. They're just harder to find because places like HN have filled up with MBAs.

(I remember ]CATALOG but not *3D0G.)

[–] hobo123 10 hours ago

But when you talk editor names, you should really rather name it "Ed".

Ed is the standard Unix text editor.

[–] petepete 1 day ago

And his brothers /bin/bzcat, /bin/pacat, /bin/netcat and /bin/sqfscat.

[–] gumby 1 day ago

But does he have a gap buffer?

He is cute though.

[–] bsoles 1 day ago

So your cat is about to get fired?

[–] neutronicus 1 day ago