Comment by panza

4 days ago

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

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panza

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mghackerlady  4 days ago

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

  • dasyatidprime  4 days ago

    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.]