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> You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing. We can acknowledge Emacs's longevity without straying into uns
by freddie_mercury 6y ago
> You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing.
We can acknowledge Emacs's longevity without straying into unsupportable hyperbole. Emacs is nowhere close to unprecedented in its age and not remotely close to the oldest piece of software still in existence.
GNU Emacs is from 1984. It is a reimplementation of the earlier 1972 Emacs. This matters, since if you're including reimplementations then obviously Unix itself, which is used by many of us every day, it older. And if you start counting from 1984...that's not especially old.
- jmoss20 6y agoFair enough! But the point stands, no? I pointed out emacs' age to note how users expectations of editors have evolved over that time. Certainly there is older software -- but is there any other user-facing software that has survived such a dramatically shifting landscape? That is the part I find unprecedented (and the part relevant to GP).
- b3n 6y ago> is there any other user-facing software that has survived such a dramatically shifting landscape? Yes. Microsoft Word, for example, is older than GNU Emacs.