Sad, really
So here's a post on LongHorn, replete with the now obligatory "It's better than Mac" yelling. In the middle of the post is something I found amusing, and kind of sad:
Speaking of Allchin, you've not lived until you've watched a group vice-president (Allchin owns Platforms, which means that he has ultimate responsibility for what goes into Windows - what you'd expect to be a fairly PHB role) go head to head with Don Box on the latter's preference for emacs (Allchin's apparently a vi man) and then write code live on stage in front of seven thousand geeks and a worldwide audience. Oh, and argue variable naming conventions too. Either a) the guy's been drilled to within an inch of his life or b) he's a quick re-learner (or, even more scary, c) he's more competent than about 50% of the dreck that wears the "Software Developer" badge)
So - to write code, neither of these people use MS tools (like, say - VS, or even an MS text editor)? They stood in front of an audience and made the implicit point that either Emacs or VI are better for code development than MS tools are. That, to me, is a marketing blunder of the first order. Wonder if anyone else picked up on it....
Comments
Untitled
[Gordon Weakliem] October 29, 2003 19:08:08.838
The fact that so many stud programmers use Emacs has me wanting to learn it. As for vi, I don't know, I feel dirty after using it, especially with a Dvorak layout. vi makes no sense at all if you don't use qwerty.
I thought you meant...
[Travis Griggs] October 29, 2003 19:38:53.035
That the other guy liked eMacs, you know the 17" CRT version of the iMac. The one that's been popping up in schools all over the place here. And I was thinking, "yet another MS developer comes out of the closet as a Mac-Adict".
I finally realized it was the uber-editor which makes my pinky soar/sore.
I liked my alternate reality a little better... :)
Emacs
[David Buck] October 29, 2003 21:41:04.563
I'm convinced that emacs stands for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift. Many moons ago, it used to be my favorite editor (considering that the alternative was vi). Now, I don't see much point in a complicated editor - I'd rather just use a browser.
Untitled
[Ziv Caspi] October 30, 2003 2:45:08.629
At one time EMACS stood for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" :-) Anyway, in my group people use Emacs, vi, Visual SlickEdit, Source Insight, and Visual Studio. I don't think the latter is even the most popular, because it does so poorly on *really* large source bases that we normally have. I'd rather have Don admit that he uses Emacs than pretend, just for the show, that he doesn't.