Guy Steele and Emacs - was Re: Classic programming

On 2015-08-09 11:25 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: Peter Siebel's "Coders at Work" features a chapter/interview with Steele: \\ Siebel: During your time at MIT you were somehow involved in the birth of Emacs. But the early history of Emacs is a hit hazy. What is your version of the story? Steele: My version of the story was that I was playing standards guy. What had happened was there was this display mode that turned TECO into something like a WYSIWYG editor. On our 24x80 screens, 21 lines of what was in the buffer would be shown on the screen and the bottom 3 lines were still a TECO command line. You'd be typing in these TECO commands and only when you hit the double altmode would they then be executed. Then there was the real-time edit mode, where it was suggested that a TECO command throw you in this other mode whereby instead of waiting for you to type the double altmode, TECO would react immediately to single character commands. If you type one character, it would do the command. You type another character, it would do the command. And most printing characters were self-inserting. Then the control characters were used to move forward, back, up, and down. It was a very, very primitive---it looked like a very primitive version of Emacs. Then came the breakthrough. The suggestion was, we have this idea of taking a character and looking it up in a table and executing TECO commands. Why don't we apply that to real-time edit mode? So that every character you can type is used as a lookup character in this table. And the default table says, printing characters are self-inserting and control characters do these things. But let's just make it programmable and see what happens. And what immediately happened was four or five different bright people around MIT had their own ideas about what to do with that. Within just a few months there were five completely incompatible GUI interfaces to TECO. Seibel: So they were just customizing, essentially, the key-bindings? Steele: That's right. And they each had their own ideas about what should be concise because you do it most often and what you can afford to be longer. So one guy, for example, was really concerned about typing in Lisp code and began to experiment with finding balanced parenthesized expressions. And another guy was more interested in text, so he was interested in commands that would move over words and convert between uppercase and lowercase and capitalize them. And that's where those commands in Emacs came from. Different people had different ideas about how the key-bindings ought to be organized. As a systems-support guy for Lisp, I was often called to people's terminals and asked to help them. And I fairly quickly noticed that I couldn't sit down at their TECOs and help them modify their programs because I'd be faced with a set of key-bindings and I had no idea what they were going to do. Seibel: Was one of those guys Richard Stallman? Steele: No, Stallman was the implementer and supporter of TECO. And he provided the built-in real-time edit mode feature, although I think Carl Mikkelsen had worked on the early version of it. He provided the key-bindings feature that made all of this possible. Anyway, there were something like four different macro packages and they were incompatible, and I decided to play standards guy, or community reconciliation guy. I saw something that had been lost in our community, which was the ability to easily help each other at our terminals. I said, "OK, we've had some experimentation; we've seen a bunch of ideas. What if we could agree on a common set of key-bindings and draw the best ideas from each of these things?" I literally had a pad of paper and ran around the building, talking to these guys, visiting each of them several times, and tried to get some kind of consensus. I was trying to get consensus on what the content ought to be and then I drew on their designs and tried to organize the actual choice of key-bindings so as to make them a little more regular and a little more mnemonic. And not being a human-factors guy at all, I didn't think at all about convenience for touch typists. I was principally concerned with mnemonic value. And so that's why Meta-C and Meta-L and Meta-U stand for capitalize and lowercase and uppercase. ... Seibel: So you made this standard set of key-bindings. How did that go over? Were people happy with it? Steele: Well, people worked through it. Then I sat down and proceeded to begin an implementation of it. And we had another idea that came into the mix at the same time and it was the idea that you could make TECO macros run a lot faster if you squeezed out the spaces and deleted all the comments. The way the TECO interpreter worked, interpreting one character at a time, when you encountered a comment it had to spend the time skipping over that comment. So we had this idea of this very primitive TECO compiler that was mostly just squeezing out the white space and the comments and doing a few other minor things to put it in a form that would run a little bit faster. So I began in an initial way to try to construct a version of this macro compressor, which I think was actually based on an earlier idea that Moon had had. I don't think I originated that idea. I began to think about how to organize the initial dispatch and organize some of the first few routines borrowing on the existing implementations of other macro pckages---I was trying to synthesize them. And about that point Stallman came along and said, "What are you doing? This looks interesting." He immediately jumped in and he could implement ten times as fast as I could, partly because he knew TECO inside out. So I worked seriously on the implementation of Emacs probably for only about four or six weeks. At which point it became clear that Stallman understood what the program was. I wanted to get back to doing graduate-student things. So Stallman did the other 99.999 percent of the work. But I played a role in catalyzing it and beginning the implementation. //