You think emacs is one of the worst things to happen to computer science? Thus putting it in the same rhetorical category as patents, multithreading, mutable d

You think emacs is one of the worst things to happen to computer science? Thus putting it in the same rhetorical category as patents, multithreading, mutable data, garbage collection, open source, closed source, closed journals, governments, debugging and Microsoft? Any one of which has far better credentials for that role? And you say this because the language it is largely written in is grotty? My god, man, get some perspective. The rest of your rant is nearly as content free--there have been more attempts at sound systems programming languages in the last five years than in the previous fifty. Look, Emacs is among the last survivors of a very powerful paradigm, along with Squeak, some Forths, AutoCAD to some degree, and a handful of others. It is one of the last metarecursive programming environments. It is not even the zenith of that paradigm--I would probably give the nod to the Symbolics machines with Zwei, but I am largely ignorant of Interlisp and know it is much beloved. These environments are self documenting (for a very specific sense of "document"), extensible, discoverable (for example, C-h k on a key sequence and then click through to the source code; or on the Symbolics you could I think Super-left click a user interface element and immediately start discovering its code, instrument it for debugging, what have you), have internals written in the same language (mostly) as the user script, and any part can be modified at run time, with the modifications taking effect immediately which is what distinguishes them from the Eclipses of the world. These environments are, almost to a man, time consuming to learn; amorphous; frequently kinda pokey; and phenomenally, improbably productive. The fact that some of them can edit text is almost an accident. I've used a cross section of editors and IDEs and build environments and what have you from recent innovations to decrepit monsters like TECO, and almost none of them have learned anything from Emacs. Some of them have better excuses than others (ed, for example, predating visual terminals). Of the alternatives the ones I found most interesting and most productive are Acme (which is brilliant, but ultimately I think too good at editing itself and not good enough at editing anything else) and Sublime Text 2 (the first new editor I can remember in years with an apropos function), and I'm including the latter mostly on promise rather than actual competence at this time.