Emacs appearances in pop culture

5 days ago (ianyepan.github.io)

In Elif Batuman's 2017 novel The Idiot, about a naive Harvard student, her not-really-a-boyfriend Ivan, a math student, enthuses to her about Emacs. The book is set in 1995.

I enjoyed the book. It got good reviews and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

  • Yes, good book! If I remember correctly, he is just learning emacs and is confounded and a bit annoyed with it. Which sounds about right.

How to sell drugs online fast was a great show because they kept stressing how they had to have the test pass in their Vue front end.

I always whenever I see code on a show/movie I wonder if it's real, a lot of times it's a mix of random languages. Sometimes just jibberish.

Also recently watched Nirvana 1997 really good.

  • Replicator code in Star Gate was iirc (it’s been a good while) the html/js for the royal bank of Canada (appropriate since it was mostly filmed in Canada).

  • One of the great onscreen code moments was in Superman III¹ where Richard Pryors’ character has written some “impossible” program and when the listing is shown on screen it’s pretty much five screens of BASIC REM statements.

    1. A movie which exists primarily to set up a joke in Office Space.

    •   5 CLS
        10 PRINT "PLOT BILATERAL CO-ORDINATES"
        15 PRINT : PRINT
        20 GOSUB 5000
        25 PRINT "INPUT CO-ORDINATE X :  "
        31 PRINT "4";
        33 PRINT "2";
        35 PRINT "Y" : PRINT
        40 PRINT "INPUT CO-ORDINATE Y :  "
        41 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 41 : IF
        42 PRINT "Z";
        43 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 43 : IF
        44 PRINT "+";
        45 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 45 : IF
        46 PRINT "X"
        47 GOSUB 5000
        50 CLS
        60 PRINT "0010 N = RND(900)"
        70 PRINT "0020 Z = 1 TO N"
        80 PRINT "0030 X = 1 TO 31"
        90 PRINT "0040 Y = 1 TO 15"
        100 PRINT "0050 SET(31-X,16-Y,Z)TO(31+X,Y,"
        110 PRINT "0060 SET(31+X,Y,Z)TO(31-X,16-Y,"
        120 PRINT "0070 SET(X,16+Y,Z-Y)TO(X,Y,Z)"
        130 PRINT "0080 SET(X,16-Y,Z+Y)TO(16+X,Y+)"
        140 PRINT "0090 GOTO 500"
        150 PRINT "0100 NEXT X:NEXT Y:NEXT Z
        160 PRINT "0110 CLS"
        170 PRINT "0120 DATA 1.13.2.67.2."
        180 PRINT "0130 DATA 12.45.90.3.23.56.2.56"
        190 PRINT "0140 DATA 3.6.1.43.92.56.2.9.08"
        200 PRINT "0150 DIM P(9)"
        210 PRINT "0160 B$ = CHR$(191)"
        220 PRINT "0170 FOR X = Y - Z : PRINT X"
        230 PRINT "0180 FOR Y = X - Z : PRINT Y"
        240 PRINT "0190 END"
        250 PRINT
        260 PRINT
        270 PRINT
        280 PRINT
        290 PRINT
        300 PRINT
        310 PRINT
        320 PRINT
        330 PRINT
        340 PRINT
        350 PRINT

  • I paused a bunch of times and I forget the details, but I remember everything always looking good, especially his brainstorming about the site and making notes about pgp and onion services and the like.

    I also loved them knowing Lenny wrote some code, as he was the only person in the world who uses snake case in javascript, because I’m also a snake case heretic.

  • > a lot of times it's a mix of random languages. Sometimes just jibberish.

    And sometimes it's just a directory listing.

I traded emacs for vscode several years ago now but this post made me wonder if I'd be insane for dusting off my herd of finely shorn yaks to try typescript dev again with it.

At the time I left for vscode, emacs had a REALLY bad Typescript story and it felt like a revelation doing TS in vscode.

Surely emacs has gotten a definitive TS solution since, idk, 2018? 2019? Right?

  • I guess so - I use built in TypeScript modes, and integrate with tsc via the built-in LSP client, eglot. Works well. Front-end specialists may disagree.

Enjoyable list but I’m not sure the AlphaGo documentary counts as pop culture :).

It’s interesting how people talk about vi vs emacs, can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim, let alone enough people to make th at the debate.

  • > can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim

    Pleased to meet you.

    Most of my console dev time is spent in *BSD, where nvi is where I land. I find the the default creature-features of vim annoying, so I end up having to configure it to be a bit more quiet, and I don't know anything so compelling about it (a vi clone (to an extreme, acknowledged)) that nvi isn't a good enough place to be. I have vim installed, but it's not my go-to.

    • > I don't know anything so compelling about it

      For me, it'd be primarily having more than one undo. Not being able to undo the second-to-last change is pretty bad. In fact, vim's undo being set up as a tree that can be walked with g- and g+ is excellent. It's impossible to lose a state of the buffer, even if you undo and make changes. It's a lot more practical to navigate than Emacs' undo, too.

      EDIT: I just realized that nvi can undo more than one change by having u toggle the direction and . continue in that direction. I don't think ex-vi could. busybox vi seems like it can undo multiple with u but it seems to have no redo.

      5 replies →

    • The only times I encounter vi (and so not sure what version, but likely barebones Linux), it doesn't indicate whether you are in insert or normal mode. So I immediately install vim (once possible).

      Is that something you just get used to, or was I using some weird vi?

      1 reply →

  • > can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim

    As a sysadmin, I prefer a basic "vi" as in most cases I want quick open/edit/close and don't need fancy colours and such. (I.e., vim.tiny on Deb/Ub rather than vim.basic.)

  • > can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim, let alone enough people to make th at the debate.

    Because vim generally offers everything vi has.

    vi does have one advantage though. It's a lot lighter. vim is like 5.4MiB in size with 82 shared library dependencies, while vi[1] is like 260KiB with 2 library dependencies (libc and ncurses).

    [1] https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/

There's an obscure Polish film from 2002, "Haker" (Hacker), obscure for many reasons and not in a good way; it's absolute drivel, not even accidentally funny in a MST3K, B movie kind of way - it's just really, really bad.

In this gem there is a conversation about hacking into some system, and a character asks another a completely nonsensical semi jargon question, which goes like this: "Did you try Emacs via Sendmail?". I shit you not.

This expression firmly cemented itself into Polish tech speak as a way to refer to or call out someone having absolutely no idea what they are taking about.

Not exactly an appearance, but I definitely give emacs a shout-out in the end notes of my new novel: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX

Nice. I've never seen any of these things except for Tron: Legacy; and I either didn't notice it was Emacs or immediately forgot if I did (you could also sorta take it to be tmux or something if you don't look closely enough to see the *eshell*). But this is the sort of thing I would generally never let my acquaintances hear the end of if I spotted :)

  • Same on the not spotting emacs, I was too focused on the fact that the commands looked right. (A `ps` to find out which process it was, then a `kill -9` of the PID). It was nice to see realistic Unix commands rather than Hollywood Hacking, for once.

> In a scene (Season 3, Episode 6) where protagonist Richard is coding with his new girlfriend Winnie at her apartment (okay, yeah… that’s not how all software engineers date, whatever the outside world may think), the two clash over the use of spaces versus tabs. Richard, a stubborn advocate of the tab character for indentation, argues: “I mean I do not get why anyone would use spaces over tabs. I mean, why not just use Vim over Emacs?” To which Winnie replies, “I do use Vim over Emacs.” Richard then breaks down, yelling, “Oh, God help us!”

Gotta admit that I use Emacs and favor spaces over tabs. And K&R braces. And you’re wrong if you make any other choice.

  • Allman FTW!

    (With you on spaces, though.)

    • waves Vim and spaces over here as well. Emacs is a great tool, I just can't stand its keyboard shortcuts. In theory I should try out evil mode, but I've got NeoVim configured how I like it and I don't want to spend the time on switching.

      As for tabs vs spaces, in theory, tabs are more flexible than spaces and allow everyone to view the file with their preferred indentation levels. In practice, I have only seen one codebase — ONE — in all my years of programming that was using tabs and yet did not end up with spaces getting mixed in with those tabs at some point along the way. (In the indentation, I mean: obviously once the non-indentation part of the line starts, you want spaces there). And that codebase had precisely two people committing regularly to it. Occasional PRs from other contributors, but only two primary maintainers.

      Every other tab-using codebase I've seen (of non-trivial size and complexity, that is), someone, somewhere, had been lazy, or had a misconfigured editor, or something, and spaces snuck into the tabs. The worst offender I ever saw was a file that had been edited by multiple people over the years, who must have had different tab settings in their editors. There was one section where they had tried to line up a bunch of variable assignments and values. (Yes, I know, bad idea, but stick with me for a minute, I'm getting to the punchline). None of the pieces of code that were supposed to line up were actually lined up. (This was C# code, so indentation didn't truly matter like it would in F#, or Python, or ... well, I won't list all of them since I'm trying to get to the point). Here's the really hilarious part. I tried all sorts of tab settings to see if I could get that file to line up. I tried 8. I tried 4. I tried 2. I even tried 3, the setting for the people who can't make their minds up between 4 and 2. Then I tried really oddball settings like 16, 5, or even 7. Nothing worked. There was no tab-size setting I could use that would make the code line up. Which entirely negates the whole point of tabs, that you can set your own indentation.

      That was the day I said "Forget about tabs, just use spaces, you won't have that problem with spaces." Tabs have great promise, but in practice, in my experience at least, you end up having to tell your colleagues "hey, you need to set your tabs to 4" (or 8, or 2, or ... well, you better not be using any other numbers) "before editing this file". Which basically negates the whole point of tabs. They're great in theory, but I've only seen ONE codebase that made them work in practice.

      4 replies →

  • I was a diehard spaces-over-tabs person until I saw this scene in Silicon Valley. I had rather naively assumed that the tab-indent default in emacs was an oversight rather than a considered decision. This scene actually educated me.

Do you lose all street cred if you use Emacs keyboard shortcuts whenever you can, but will use vim/nvim if there is no other choice?

  • You can just use evil mode inside emacs and get the best of both worlds.

    Vim and Emacs barely overlap in functionality.

  • You always have a choice. Sometimes the best move is not to play.

    • A long time ago I was doing some on-site programming at a swiss bank, and the only available editors were vi on a Sun, or EDIT on a VMS machine (the project involved both.) I learned rudimentary vi on the fly while waiting for ftp-by-mail-over-uucp to deliver GNU emacs sources :-)

I've often felt that Emacs is more popular in Japan than I'd expect. Could just be blue car syndrome on my part.

  • There's two reasons for this, I think. The most obvious is that emacs has better CJK support compared to any other editor of the time. The less obvious is that Japan liked lisp machines and lisp in general a lot

    • Notably, Yukihiro Matsumoto took substantial inspiration from Lisp while designing the Ruby language. You can see historical Lisp terminology in the Ruby interpreter sources (at least last I checked, which was a long time ago), like the use of “Q” to refer to a dynamically typed datum that can be stored in a cell.

      (Hah, I just looked around a bit more, and Wikipedia cites an archived mailing list message that I don't remember seeing before: https://web.archive.org/web/20181027195101/http://blade.naga... I remember at some point Emacs Lisp specifically being cited as an inspiration, but I might be confabulating that, I didn't find a source for it.)

      Also, here's a fun paragraph from the opening comments of quail.el (lightly reformatted):

      > [There was an input method for Mule 2.3 called ‘Tamago’ from the Japanese ‘TAkusan MAtasete GOmen-nasai’, or ‘Sorry for having you wait so long’; this couldn't be included in Emacs 20. ‘Tamago’ is Japanese for ‘egg’ (implicitly a hen's egg). Handa-san made a smaller and simpler system; the smaller quail egg is also eaten in Japan. Maybe others will be egged on to write more sorts of input methods.]

      7 replies →

Jamie Zawinski should be on the list. He hacked on XEmacs for ages.

  • If so, balance good and evil by including marca of A16Z, once an Epoch maintainer.

I'd add rms/Richard Stallman to that list of famous emacs users. He's famous for way more than just gnu emacs, so it's not quite cheating.

  • I also wondered why RMS is not in the list of famous people using Emacs. He's the frickin creator and also famous. Or is he a persona non grata now?

  • I found it kinda funny he's not on the list; he should be the first there, without him Emacs would probably be a footnote in SW history.

i have been using it from collage. 15 years+ now, i still love it for it's design, and i would expect to use for another 15 years.

See also https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsStories

The air traffic control one is my favorite :)

-----

And when searching for emacs air traffic control I stumbled on https://www.idsairnav.com/main-areas/aim/airport-em-environm... haha:

> EMACS, Electromagnetic Control and Survey, is an AIM (aeronautical information management) tool that applies advanced simulation techniques to perform airport and Enroute electromagnetic environment analysis as well as airport and en-route electromagnetic site verification.

That TRON theme linked in the article is cool, thanks for sharing.

At risk of being downvoted into oblivion by the emacs gang, I wonder if someone’s got a similar theme for vim?

IIRC there’s another scene in Silicon Valley where they have a post-it board of feature ideas for their software and one of them is “emacs keybindings.”