7 ms·

Emacs used as a message router in Germany's ATC systems in the 1990s (2021)

222 points by signa11 2y ago

bitwize 2y ago
This is pretty much the definition of "cursed". I'm reminded of the much more positive story from Steve Yegge about a customer service system at Amazon that used Emacs as its UI. Apparently the customer-service reps loved it, and missed using Emacs when the transition was made to an all-new Java app. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel (C-f "When Amazon got its start")
- bfors 2y ago
  I had a moment where I considered switching to emacs when reading that section. Would love to see the workflow of one of the devs from that time.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    You might still consider giving it a try. There is a learning curve, but it's a sigmoid with a remarkable slope past the first knee; I don't necessarily buy all of Yegge's boosterism, but I will say that in those places where I've had the reputation of getting stuff done that no one else could and faster than anyone expected, it's been my skill with Emacs that gave rise to the large majority of that reputation. (I don't necessarily no-sell all that boosterism, either. The most basal ancestor of today's GNU Emacs dates to the mid-1970s; if the 'Lindy effect' holds true, it really is the 100-year editor.)
  - b112 2y ago
    I'm not shocked. Same story with Wordperfect and all its F-keys, and keyboard shortcuts, over Word and its mouse driven UI. Secretaries at the time hated the change. Text input is so much faster, and of you're typing a lot, keyboard <-> mouse movements slow you down.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      I'm still learning how powerful all of Emacs' navigation bindings can be, and I've been using it exclusively since 2010. Never leaving the home row, and not needing a weird keyboard or a million fragile overrides, is a superpower - and one that also applies anywhere GNU readline is available.
  - goy 2y ago
    I decided to switch to Emacs reading this too. I was a fervent of the Vim church, but now I see the light.
- groby_b 2y ago
  Look, you might think this is cursed. I worked for a subsidiary of Capgemini, German ATC system as well, a couple years later, and I'd have welcomed a message router in undocumented elisp. It would've been a very clear step up.
nxobject 2y ago
Emacs as a RAD environment/terminal Visual Basic? Check that off my Emacs bingo board…
- anthk 2y ago
  Emacs has a widget library.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    For a start. See also https://www.leonrische.me/pages/mouse_events_on_images_in_emacs.html https://www.leonrische.me/pages/mouse_events_on_images_in_em...
Postosuchus 2y ago
Speaking of crazy applications of Emacs... Long long time ago, my team was tasked with rebuilding an MBS analytics system for one of the leading fintech companies. The original system ran on DEC VAX and was written in VMS Pascal (let's just say, a very unique flavor of Pascal). Rewriting it from scratch was not an option (it would take decades to implement all that complexity and to make sure it worked correctly). Instead, we utilized a combination of tools that first transformed the Pascal code into the form that was closer to more popular Pascal dialects (which included using a Scheme compiler and (drum roll) Emacs in batch mode), applied a set of hand-made patches, translated into C using p2c, and finally built on Linux. As crazy as it sounds, it worked well enough to be used as a foundation for the next gen of mortgage analytics.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  I am slightly disappointed that the solution was not to run a VAX emulator. :)
  - Postosuchus 2y ago
    I don't think VAX emulators were the thing back then. :-) In fact, our target platform was a cluster of commodity DEC Alpha machines running an early version of RedHat Linux for AXP. I know for a fact, that we were the first system that employed Linux clusters in fintech.
    - ggm 2y ago
      They weren't but .. if you were doing it now QEMU and OpenVMS would probably be the natural approach.
  - 0x445442 2y ago
    This is what Ticketmaster did. Up until a few years ago, and it’s probably still the case, they heart of their reservation system was written for the VAX in the 70’s. When they had to make the hardware/OS switch, rather than port, the went to an emulator. Edit: spelling
- 2y ago
dailykoder 2y ago
>Early ‘90s, after “Die Wende” It was a peaceful revolution. Wende is a term coined by the SED and misleading. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprachkritik-wer-wende-sagt-sagt-eben-nicht-revolution-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprachkritik-wer-wende-sagt-s... (in german tho)
- fpetm 2y ago
  That's interesting. In Hungary the end of communism is called "rendszerváltás" (lit. change of system) or "rendszerváltozás" (lit. change in system). There is a small debate about which term is more appropriate, although they are mostly used interchangeably but nobody calls it a revolution. The process was completely peaceful and legal, unlike other places where the change was more chaotic and violent.
  - nier 2y ago
    Yes, please don’t assume that most people who speak German call it a revolution either. Wende means turnaround and that’s good enough for the rest of us. But today I learned that Hungarian is a Uralic not a Slavic language and so of course I had no chance discerning which word in «rendszerváltás» stood for system or change, which made me mad enough to want to look it up: rendszer (“system”) +‎ váltás (“change”)
    - fpetm 2y ago
      The names given to these important events are always controversial and are often politically motivated. For example in Hungary the 1956 revolution was called a counterrevolution under socialism, or for a more recent example the election of Orban in 2010 (who has been prime minister since) is often called another "rendszerváltás" in opposition circles. Also, Hungarian being an agglutanative language the word "rendszerváltás" breaks down into simpler roots: "rendszer" = "rend" (order) + "-szer" (unique suffix) and "vált" (to change) + "ás" (suffix which turns verbs into nouns). I find this language really cool because of the fact that most words decompose into very simple morphemes.
dustfinger 2y ago
Looks like someone deleted the wiki article and replaced it with an insult to hn and a racist slur. This is currently what I see when I navigate to the linked article: > hn sux, pjals is probably in love with autione. niggers all. If there are any emacs wiki admins reading this, you might want to look into correcting this. -- EDIT -- I reached out to #emacs on librechat and it has been reverted.
- dustfinger 2y ago
  It is still being vandalized. Trying to find someone that can lock the page for now.
cbsmith 2y ago
Wow... and now the page is getting vandalized repeatedly. Hard not to believe this isn't related to it making HN.
- cbsmith 2y ago
  For anyone looking at a vandalized page, the reddit comment the non-vandalized version was sourced from is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzisy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzi...
- dustfinger 2y ago
  Yup. I am on #emacs channel at liberachat. People are trying to find an admin to revert and lock the page. No point in reverting without an admin because the vandal just edits it agian.
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    Antisemites (really, any hate group) are indefatigable. :-(
lambdaone 2y ago
I see the page has been vandalized; here is a link to the original: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=EmacsStories;revision=3 https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=EmacsStorie...
- cbsmith 2y ago
  Also the reddit version of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzisy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzi...
aftbit 2y ago
I don't even understand what was built in emacs. A "message router"? Its job was to take messages in from a set of links and transfer them out some other set of links? How did it know what links led where, or how to make progress towards the final hop? How was the path computed? If TCP/IP was already available as a layer, why not just use its routing capabilities? What was DCE and how did it help?
- p_l 2y ago
  TCP/IP only understands routing along IP addresses. "Message router" usually involves understanding higher level entities - In this case, it would understand that a given type of message with given information needs to be forwarded to X, Y, and Z. DCE was "Distributed Computing Environment", and provided among other things RPC system that is still used by MS Windows NT and DCOM. In this case it was easier to make all parts of the system first talk TCP/IP, then use DCE to provide glue code between divergent environments.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
rbc 2y ago
There are times when I wonder if calling GNU Emacs an editor is really descriptive. Editing is just one window, to what's really an integrated Lisp development and runtime environment. Compare some Lisp Machine features to the GNU Emacs features: Zmacs -> Emacs, Zmail -> Rmail (or Gnus), Symbolics Document Examiner -> Info, Lisp Machine Lisp -> Emacs Lisp (both children of Maclisp). There may be other examples that I'm not aware of. GNU Emacs might have started as an editor, but it's certainly grown beyond that. Maybe its become a sort of Valinor, a realm for uprooted Lisp machine users to continue the craft.
- AceJohnny2 2y ago
  > GNU Emacs might have started as an editor, but it's certainly grown beyond that Hence the old joke: "Emacs sure is a great operating system, pity it's missing a good text editor" It has also inspired "Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail" (Zawinski worked on both XEmacs and Netscape...)
  - john2x 2y ago
    It has a good text editor now, thanks to evil-mode
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      the actual base standard emacs keybindings are great and always have been, esp if you have a real keyboard
      - gray_-_wolf 2y ago
        Not a huge fan of C-x o. Always remap it to M-o. Dunno, maybe my workflow is just bad, but I switch windows a lot.
        thom 2y ago
        I generally use windmove, and have Ctrl-Shift-F/B/P/N move to the window in the respective direction.
harry8 2y ago
You think that's seedy? I once used excel & vba as an intranet webserver to collect weekly business analytics using user input into web forms from various departments. A very little knowledge, no proper resourcing, no support, internal politics determined the effort should fail came together to produce such a "success" Got a seedy story like that? Seedier than that? Let's hear it!
- bitwize 2y ago
  Bahahahaha. I wrote a Perl script for a client to provide CSV records as results to search queries sent by the main application, a custom tool in Microsoft Access my friend had created. We managed to convince the client to install the Perl script on IIS on some shitty little Windows NT box they had. There was no cloud, and no web services hype yet. Linux was still an experiment for college kids to work with... Windows NT was the future of enterprise servers that did real work. Anyhoo, our crappy little "web service" did the job. The client's sales personnel were able to upload, search for, and retrieve the process analyses they used to sell new equipment to their customers.
- RyJones 2y ago
  I knew no Visual Basic. Microsoft was converting from XNS to TCP/IP and MSMAIL to Exchange. I wrote the automation to port mspager from MSMAIL to Exchange - if you were in a thread on MSMAIL, you cc:mspager, and everyone on the thread with a pager would get a page. I must have spent as many as six hours hacking something together to make it run. Ah, the 90s. I also wrote a tool to catch people setting up remote dialins so a) they had internet from home b) could share those links with friends to grab stuff from the products server. It ran on Linux and used a network sniffer to catch people. ITG was crazy!
justanothersys 2y ago
i run emacs inside the terminal in vscode so i can have a terminal multiplexer with vim shortcuts clipboard sharing and other weird integrations :)
chrchr 2y ago
Emacs in the 2020s is getting better and better as an application platform. Everything is faster thanks to native code compilation. There are multiple frameworks for interaction, including transient, forms-mode, widget.el, probably some others. There's native support for SVG, formatting and styling text, displaying bitmap images, etc. It's cross platform. You could do a lot worse.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  totally. but biggest problem is it's still single-threaded and an errant program can still lock the whole thing up and i understand this is extremely difficult to fix
  - aulin 2y ago
    how often does that happen? doing what?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      things like opening a remote network connection etc
      - anthk 2y ago
        That should have rewritten with async long ago. Not the whole Emacs, but creating tramp a subprocess binary or an async elisp function.
    - sintax 2y ago
      Unfortunately, more often that I want. My emacs locks up for multiple seconds a few times a week. Yet, been using emacs for 20+ years, so changing to something else is difficult. It's especially noticeable with LSP stuff.
- 2y ago
noufalibrahim 2y ago
It's been posted on HN before but it's probably relevant to this thread. Steve Yegge had a post about how Emacs was used heavily inside Amazon's customer support system https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel
- masfoobar 2y ago
  I appreciate Steve Yegge content. I didn't know about emacs and the customer support thing -- will look it up and read it. I believe it was reading his site (a number of years ago, might I add) that convinced me to swap my LCTRL with CAPS on my keyboard. Best decision.. ever! Now my pinky has been much more comfortable ever since! Of course, my co-workers hate it that I have swapped keys. They forget about and wonder why capital letters are not working, or trying to copy/cut/paste. lol. On windows, I use to update the registry directly. Today, I use PowerToys... so I can just close it if someone else uses my keyboard. Anyway -- diverting the topic a little. +1 to Mr Steve Yegge!
masfoobar 2y ago
I enjoy reading stories like this, considering Emacs is still going today --- and I am a regular! I use emacs for many programming languages. However, when it came to .NET development (at work) - I had to stick with Visual Studio. I always toyed the idea of Visual Studio Code but, due to some of the projects, it was not easy to do when we were using .NET Framework. Once we were getting closer to .NET Core, however, I knew emacs was becomming a possibility. My work colleagues see "emacs" on one of my screens at work. They are puzzled why I use it to generate code or do git, etc, with it - but rarely ask questions. One thing I was surprised about, when we finally moved away from .NET framework to .NET Core (.NET 6 and later) -- I was surprised when one member of the team said he was planning to switch from using Visual Studio.. the IDE, to Visual Studio Code. I asked why and he said is just likes it behaving more as a text editor than a full development environment. Of course, I understood what he meant by that. Its weird, especially in microsoft stack land, to hear a .NET developer say this. Truth is -- many seem to be moving to Visual Studio Code. It had to take another Microsoft product to do that, considering we always had vi/vim, emacs, or others like sublime text, etc. Before Visual Studio Code, if I dare mention using a text editor for a .NET project, I would have been given all sorts of puzzled faces. How times change. Today... while most are still using Visual Studio (IDE).. we now have 2 developers using Visual Studio Code. As for me... I am using:- eglot, company, yasnipet, flycheck, etc... EMACS+Omnisharp! I even wrote functions to easily create new solutions, projects, unit tests, etc. Programming is enjoyable with emacs. It makes me happy.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  I use VS Code for Javascript when I am working on Frontend, but even if all of our backend stack is at least .NET 6, I still prefer using Visual Studio for .NET code. Maybe I am too attuned to keyboard shortcuts in VS, but I also like hitting buttons to launch containers, debug, jump to definitions, run tests and so on. I quite enjoy working in Visual Studio. Also, before using VS for .NET I was using VS for C and C++. Even when I coded in Linux I searched for IDEs instead of text editors. For git I prefer the command line. I don't think there's right or wrong, use whatever tool makes you comfortable and productive.
  - 2y ago
DeathArrow 2y ago
Speaking about VMS I wonder why did it disappear. It was so bad compared to Unix?
- p_l 2y ago
  Unix was effectively free for a long time, ported to pretty much everything, and with source-based portability a lot of software could be adapted between places. VMS could be way more solid than whatever was cobbled in Unix (outside expensive niche implementations) but over time Unix would grow and grow while VMS was limited in users and platforms. [1] Digital selling off some of the software packages they used to provide with VMS only made for quicker demise. [1] This is also oft-forgotten reason why Oracle got so widespread in enterprises - you could get Oracle with most features on most platforms, even if some were more blessed than others. It might run slower than packages optimized for given platform (think DB2 on S/390, Rdb on VMS) but it would be mostly the same database whether you connected to development server on PC, some department's VAX Cluster, or your recent acquisition's IBM Mainframe.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
A bit a digression but the community around #emacs on freenode and emacswiki.org was really wonderful when I was active on it in the early 2000s. Lots of people who were as helpful as they were knowledgeable. ALmost none of the internet trolling and bile that plagues many modern fora and real friendships formed from meeting people online. It's a great throwback to see a page from that site on HN.
immibis 2y ago
Page was vandalized. Not in recent changes, so done with Alex's direct db access.

222 points by signa11 2y ago

This is pretty much the definition of "cursed". I'm reminded of the much more positive story from Steve Yegge about a customer service system at Amazon that used Emacs as its UI. Apparently the customer-service reps loved it, and missed using Emacs when the transition was made to an all-new Java app. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel (C-f "When Amazon got its start")

bfors 2y ago
I had a moment where I considered switching to emacs when reading that section. Would love to see the workflow of one of the devs from that time.
- throwanem 2y ago
  You might still consider giving it a try. There is a learning curve, but it's a sigmoid with a remarkable slope past the first knee; I don't necessarily buy all of Yegge's boosterism, but I will say that in those places where I've had the reputation of getting stuff done that no one else could and faster than anyone expected, it's been my skill with Emacs that gave rise to the large majority of that reputation. (I don't necessarily no-sell all that boosterism, either. The most basal ancestor of today's GNU Emacs dates to the mid-1970s; if the 'Lindy effect' holds true, it really is the 100-year editor.)
- b112 2y ago
  I'm not shocked. Same story with Wordperfect and all its F-keys, and keyboard shortcuts, over Word and its mouse driven UI. Secretaries at the time hated the change. Text input is so much faster, and of you're typing a lot, keyboard <-> mouse movements slow you down.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    I'm still learning how powerful all of Emacs' navigation bindings can be, and I've been using it exclusively since 2010. Never leaving the home row, and not needing a weird keyboard or a million fragile overrides, is a superpower - and one that also applies anywhere GNU readline is available.
- goy 2y ago
  I decided to switch to Emacs reading this too. I was a fervent of the Vim church, but now I see the light.
groby_b 2y ago
Look, you might think this is cursed. I worked for a subsidiary of Capgemini, German ATC system as well, a couple years later, and I'd have welcomed a message router in undocumented elisp. It would've been a very clear step up.

nxobject 2y ago

Emacs as a RAD environment/terminal Visual Basic? Check that off my Emacs bingo board…

anthk 2y ago
Emacs has a widget library.
- throwanem 2y ago
  For a start. See also https://www.leonrische.me/pages/mouse_events_on_images_in_emacs.html https://www.leonrische.me/pages/mouse_events_on_images_in_em...

Postosuchus 2y ago

Speaking of crazy applications of Emacs... Long long time ago, my team was tasked with rebuilding an MBS analytics system for one of the leading fintech companies. The original system ran on DEC VAX and was written in VMS Pascal (let's just say, a very unique flavor of Pascal). Rewriting it from scratch was not an option (it would take decades to implement all that complexity and to make sure it worked correctly). Instead, we utilized a combination of tools that first transformed the Pascal code into the form that was closer to more popular Pascal dialects (which included using a Scheme compiler and (drum roll) Emacs in batch mode), applied a set of hand-made patches, translated into C using p2c, and finally built on Linux. As crazy as it sounds, it worked well enough to be used as a foundation for the next gen of mortgage analytics.

actionfromafar 2y ago
I am slightly disappointed that the solution was not to run a VAX emulator. :)
- Postosuchus 2y ago
  I don't think VAX emulators were the thing back then. :-) In fact, our target platform was a cluster of commodity DEC Alpha machines running an early version of RedHat Linux for AXP. I know for a fact, that we were the first system that employed Linux clusters in fintech.
  - ggm 2y ago
    They weren't but .. if you were doing it now QEMU and OpenVMS would probably be the natural approach.
- 0x445442 2y ago
  This is what Ticketmaster did. Up until a few years ago, and it’s probably still the case, they heart of their reservation system was written for the VAX in the 70’s. When they had to make the hardware/OS switch, rather than port, the went to an emulator. Edit: spelling
2y ago

dailykoder 2y ago

>Early ‘90s, after “Die Wende” It was a peaceful revolution. Wende is a term coined by the SED and misleading. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprachkritik-wer-wende-sagt-sagt-eben-nicht-revolution-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprachkritik-wer-wende-sagt-s... (in german tho)

fpetm 2y ago
That's interesting. In Hungary the end of communism is called "rendszerváltás" (lit. change of system) or "rendszerváltozás" (lit. change in system). There is a small debate about which term is more appropriate, although they are mostly used interchangeably but nobody calls it a revolution. The process was completely peaceful and legal, unlike other places where the change was more chaotic and violent.
- nier 2y ago
  Yes, please don’t assume that most people who speak German call it a revolution either. Wende means turnaround and that’s good enough for the rest of us. But today I learned that Hungarian is a Uralic not a Slavic language and so of course I had no chance discerning which word in «rendszerváltás» stood for system or change, which made me mad enough to want to look it up: rendszer (“system”) +‎ váltás (“change”)
  - fpetm 2y ago
    The names given to these important events are always controversial and are often politically motivated. For example in Hungary the 1956 revolution was called a counterrevolution under socialism, or for a more recent example the election of Orban in 2010 (who has been prime minister since) is often called another "rendszerváltás" in opposition circles. Also, Hungarian being an agglutanative language the word "rendszerváltás" breaks down into simpler roots: "rendszer" = "rend" (order) + "-szer" (unique suffix) and "vált" (to change) + "ás" (suffix which turns verbs into nouns). I find this language really cool because of the fact that most words decompose into very simple morphemes.

dustfinger 2y ago

Looks like someone deleted the wiki article and replaced it with an insult to hn and a racist slur. This is currently what I see when I navigate to the linked article: > hn sux, pjals is probably in love with autione. niggers all. If there are any emacs wiki admins reading this, you might want to look into correcting this. -- EDIT -- I reached out to #emacs on librechat and it has been reverted.

dustfinger 2y ago
It is still being vandalized. Trying to find someone that can lock the page for now.

cbsmith 2y ago

Wow... and now the page is getting vandalized repeatedly. Hard not to believe this isn't related to it making HN.

cbsmith 2y ago
For anyone looking at a vandalized page, the reddit comment the non-vandalized version was sourced from is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzisy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzi...
dustfinger 2y ago
Yup. I am on #emacs channel at liberachat. People are trying to find an admin to revert and lock the page. No point in reverting without an admin because the vandal just edits it agian.
- cbsmith 2y ago
  Antisemites (really, any hate group) are indefatigable. :-(

lambdaone 2y ago

I see the page has been vandalized; here is a link to the original: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=EmacsStories;revision=3 https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=EmacsStorie...

cbsmith 2y ago
Also the reddit version of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzisy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzi...

aftbit 2y ago

I don't even understand what was built in emacs. A "message router"? Its job was to take messages in from a set of links and transfer them out some other set of links? How did it know what links led where, or how to make progress towards the final hop? How was the path computed? If TCP/IP was already available as a layer, why not just use its routing capabilities? What was DCE and how did it help?

p_l 2y ago
TCP/IP only understands routing along IP addresses. "Message router" usually involves understanding higher level entities - In this case, it would understand that a given type of message with given information needs to be forwarded to X, Y, and Z. DCE was "Distributed Computing Environment", and provided among other things RPC system that is still used by MS Windows NT and DCOM. In this case it was easier to make all parts of the system first talk TCP/IP, then use DCE to provide glue code between divergent environments.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

rbc 2y ago

There are times when I wonder if calling GNU Emacs an editor is really descriptive. Editing is just one window, to what's really an integrated Lisp development and runtime environment. Compare some Lisp Machine features to the GNU Emacs features: Zmacs -> Emacs, Zmail -> Rmail (or Gnus), Symbolics Document Examiner -> Info, Lisp Machine Lisp -> Emacs Lisp (both children of Maclisp). There may be other examples that I'm not aware of. GNU Emacs might have started as an editor, but it's certainly grown beyond that. Maybe its become a sort of Valinor, a realm for uprooted Lisp machine users to continue the craft.

AceJohnny2 2y ago
> GNU Emacs might have started as an editor, but it's certainly grown beyond that Hence the old joke: "Emacs sure is a great operating system, pity it's missing a good text editor" It has also inspired "Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail" (Zawinski worked on both XEmacs and Netscape...)
- john2x 2y ago
  It has a good text editor now, thanks to evil-mode
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    the actual base standard emacs keybindings are great and always have been, esp if you have a real keyboard
    - gray_-_wolf 2y ago
      Not a huge fan of C-x o. Always remap it to M-o. Dunno, maybe my workflow is just bad, but I switch windows a lot.
      - thom 2y ago
        I generally use windmove, and have Ctrl-Shift-F/B/P/N move to the window in the respective direction.

harry8 2y ago

You think that's seedy? I once used excel & vba as an intranet webserver to collect weekly business analytics using user input into web forms from various departments. A very little knowledge, no proper resourcing, no support, internal politics determined the effort should fail came together to produce such a "success" Got a seedy story like that? Seedier than that? Let's hear it!

bitwize 2y ago
Bahahahaha. I wrote a Perl script for a client to provide CSV records as results to search queries sent by the main application, a custom tool in Microsoft Access my friend had created. We managed to convince the client to install the Perl script on IIS on some shitty little Windows NT box they had. There was no cloud, and no web services hype yet. Linux was still an experiment for college kids to work with... Windows NT was the future of enterprise servers that did real work. Anyhoo, our crappy little "web service" did the job. The client's sales personnel were able to upload, search for, and retrieve the process analyses they used to sell new equipment to their customers.
RyJones 2y ago
I knew no Visual Basic. Microsoft was converting from XNS to TCP/IP and MSMAIL to Exchange. I wrote the automation to port mspager from MSMAIL to Exchange - if you were in a thread on MSMAIL, you cc:mspager, and everyone on the thread with a pager would get a page. I must have spent as many as six hours hacking something together to make it run. Ah, the 90s. I also wrote a tool to catch people setting up remote dialins so a) they had internet from home b) could share those links with friends to grab stuff from the products server. It ran on Linux and used a network sniffer to catch people. ITG was crazy!

justanothersys 2y ago

i run emacs inside the terminal in vscode so i can have a terminal multiplexer with vim shortcuts clipboard sharing and other weird integrations :)

chrchr 2y ago

Emacs in the 2020s is getting better and better as an application platform. Everything is faster thanks to native code compilation. There are multiple frameworks for interaction, including transient, forms-mode, widget.el, probably some others. There's native support for SVG, formatting and styling text, displaying bitmap images, etc. It's cross platform. You could do a lot worse.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
totally. but biggest problem is it's still single-threaded and an errant program can still lock the whole thing up and i understand this is extremely difficult to fix
- aulin 2y ago
  how often does that happen? doing what?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    things like opening a remote network connection etc
    - anthk 2y ago
      That should have rewritten with async long ago. Not the whole Emacs, but creating tramp a subprocess binary or an async elisp function.
  - sintax 2y ago
    Unfortunately, more often that I want. My emacs locks up for multiple seconds a few times a week. Yet, been using emacs for 20+ years, so changing to something else is difficult. It's especially noticeable with LSP stuff.
2y ago

noufalibrahim 2y ago

It's been posted on HN before but it's probably relevant to this thread. Steve Yegge had a post about how Emacs was used heavily inside Amazon's customer support system https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

masfoobar 2y ago
I appreciate Steve Yegge content. I didn't know about emacs and the customer support thing -- will look it up and read it. I believe it was reading his site (a number of years ago, might I add) that convinced me to swap my LCTRL with CAPS on my keyboard. Best decision.. ever! Now my pinky has been much more comfortable ever since! Of course, my co-workers hate it that I have swapped keys. They forget about and wonder why capital letters are not working, or trying to copy/cut/paste. lol. On windows, I use to update the registry directly. Today, I use PowerToys... so I can just close it if someone else uses my keyboard. Anyway -- diverting the topic a little. +1 to Mr Steve Yegge!

masfoobar 2y ago

I enjoy reading stories like this, considering Emacs is still going today --- and I am a regular! I use emacs for many programming languages. However, when it came to .NET development (at work) - I had to stick with Visual Studio. I always toyed the idea of Visual Studio Code but, due to some of the projects, it was not easy to do when we were using .NET Framework. Once we were getting closer to .NET Core, however, I knew emacs was becomming a possibility. My work colleagues see "emacs" on one of my screens at work. They are puzzled why I use it to generate code or do git, etc, with it - but rarely ask questions. One thing I was surprised about, when we finally moved away from .NET framework to .NET Core (.NET 6 and later) -- I was surprised when one member of the team said he was planning to switch from using Visual Studio.. the IDE, to Visual Studio Code. I asked why and he said is just likes it behaving more as a text editor than a full development environment. Of course, I understood what he meant by that. Its weird, especially in microsoft stack land, to hear a .NET developer say this. Truth is -- many seem to be moving to Visual Studio Code. It had to take another Microsoft product to do that, considering we always had vi/vim, emacs, or others like sublime text, etc. Before Visual Studio Code, if I dare mention using a text editor for a .NET project, I would have been given all sorts of puzzled faces. How times change. Today... while most are still using Visual Studio (IDE).. we now have 2 developers using Visual Studio Code. As for me... I am using:- eglot, company, yasnipet, flycheck, etc... EMACS+Omnisharp! I even wrote functions to easily create new solutions, projects, unit tests, etc. Programming is enjoyable with emacs. It makes me happy.

DeathArrow 2y ago
I use VS Code for Javascript when I am working on Frontend, but even if all of our backend stack is at least .NET 6, I still prefer using Visual Studio for .NET code. Maybe I am too attuned to keyboard shortcuts in VS, but I also like hitting buttons to launch containers, debug, jump to definitions, run tests and so on. I quite enjoy working in Visual Studio. Also, before using VS for .NET I was using VS for C and C++. Even when I coded in Linux I searched for IDEs instead of text editors. For git I prefer the command line. I don't think there's right or wrong, use whatever tool makes you comfortable and productive.
- 2y ago

DeathArrow 2y ago

Speaking about VMS I wonder why did it disappear. It was so bad compared to Unix?

p_l 2y ago
Unix was effectively free for a long time, ported to pretty much everything, and with source-based portability a lot of software could be adapted between places. VMS could be way more solid than whatever was cobbled in Unix (outside expensive niche implementations) but over time Unix would grow and grow while VMS was limited in users and platforms. [1] Digital selling off some of the software packages they used to provide with VMS only made for quicker demise. [1] This is also oft-forgotten reason why Oracle got so widespread in enterprises - you could get Oracle with most features on most platforms, even if some were more blessed than others. It might run slower than packages optimized for given platform (think DB2 on S/390, Rdb on VMS) but it would be mostly the same database whether you connected to development server on PC, some department's VAX Cluster, or your recent acquisition's IBM Mainframe.

noufalibrahim 2y ago

A bit a digression but the community around #emacs on freenode and emacswiki.org was really wonderful when I was active on it in the early 2000s. Lots of people who were as helpful as they were knowledgeable. ALmost none of the internet trolling and bile that plagues many modern fora and real friendships formed from meeting people online. It's a great throwback to see a page from that site on HN.

immibis 2y ago

Page was vandalized. Not in recent changes, so done with Alex's direct db access.