5 ms·
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?
by wpollock 10mo ago
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?
- d3Xt3r 10mo agoAn emergency bootable/rescue tool for Macs!
- Izkata 10mo ago"Mac OS through email" was what popped into my mind. No idea how that would work.
- pesus 10mo agoI still think of the short-lived Apple eMac when I read it.
- morshu9001 10mo agoIt's funny how they sold that into 2006, with a CRT still
- KingLancelot 10mo ago[dead]
- accrual 10mo agoSame! I had eMacs in school and loved them, they were my first exposure to the array of characters "emac".
- ErroneousBosh 10mo agoUses eight megs of RAM and constantly swaps?
- ralferoo 10mo agoMaybe a geekbench from yesteryear. Back in the mists of time it was apocryphally known as "eight megs and continually swapping". But I guess that's a couple of orders of magnitude out nowadays.
- jolmg 10mo agoIt's still to his point: > Even when engineers get creative, there’s logic: a butterfly valve actually looks like butterfly wings. You can tell how the name relates to what it actually defines, and how it can be memorable. Editor MACroS still has a logic. It isn't just random.
- wat10000 10mo agoA butterfly valve is a category of thing. The corresponding word for emacs would be "editor." That is entirely descriptive: an editor edits. Picking a specific butterfly valve randomly from an internet search, I find one called the FNW FNWHPA1LSTG24. Product types and categories get generic names, specific products often get weird names. It's true in just about every field.
- jolmg 10mo agoSomeone was probably the first to call their valve a butterfly valve. Emacs can also be taken to be a category of editors. There are multiple emacs-derived editors.
- mvdtnz 10mo agoThat's as good as random.
- ctoth 10mo ago> If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does? Hmm, this looks like a nonsense word, but sometimes words look like nonsense when you write them backwards, maybe it's a scame?
- gibsonsmog 10mo agoBased on the article headlines I've seen over the years, I don't think emacs users know what emacs does except "yes"
- 9rx 10mo agoIf you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called a "combine" does? Combine things? Nope. Its purpose is to separate things... Its not just the software industry.
- rkomorn 10mo agoI'm conflicted because you're not entirely wrong (that it's not just the software industry), but the name is because the combine combines steps that used to be separate. It's not actually badly named.
- 9rx 10mo ago> I'm conflicted That's why I chose that specific example! What fun would there be in you not having to think about it?
- wat10000 10mo agoMore to the point, what does a John Deere S7 600 do, or a 310 G-Tier, or a Z515E ZTrak? Emacs is an editor. That part is descriptive: an editor edits. The product name is not expected to describe what the product is. The general product category is what does that.
- 9rx 10mo ago> The product name is not expected to describe what the product is. There are some exceptions, but the agriculture machinery industry has actually gotten pretty good at making the names useful, with reasonable consistency across brands. S7 600: 600 tells that it is a class 6 combine, which is a value farmers understand as it pertains to the combine's capacity. For tractors, the John Deere 8R 230 sees 8 indicate a large row-crop frame, and 230 indicates a 230 HP engine. A New Holland T7.180 is, you guessed it, a medium row-crop frame with a 180 HP engine. It may look like nothing to outsiders, but there is a lot of useful information encoded in there once you know what to look for.
- wat10000 10mo ago
- gowld 10mo agoConstantly Swapping its Eight Megabytes, of course. https://google.com/search?q=Eight+Megabytes++And+Constantly+Swapping https://google.com/search?q=Eight+Megabytes++And+Constantly+...
- Oreb 10mo ago“Emacs Makes Any Computer Slow” is another one I remember from back in the days.