Classic programming

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Eric Christopherson

    > people who like to program in languages or language implementations or
    > libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use?

I prefer to write code under (effectively) V6 Unix; I find that I can get
things working and done faster there than in any other environment. Of course,
if one sticks to just the Standard I/O library, you can get more or less than
same environment pretty much everywhere: Windows, Linux, etc.


    > From: Sean Conner

    > My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an
    > operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and
    > specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get
    > custom system calls to use. 
    > ...
    > [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/

Wow. I had a look at that site: Very Very Very Cool.

Is source still extant anywhere? (I know, I could email the creator...)


Also, ISTR a post which talked about Guy Steele working on EMACS. I don't
think that can be correct - Guy had, IIRC, departed MIT before I got to Tech
Sq, and EMACS had just started being developed when I got there.

As to who actually did do EMACS, it was a cast of characters, and I wasn't
enough part of it to know who should be listed. RMS was, of course, primus
inter pares, but there were others. E.g. I remember Gene Cicarelli did 
some stuff.

There was this thing called IVORY which IIRC 'purified' TECO code so that it
could be dumped out in a compressed form (for faster loading, execution, etc
- it may have also been possible to have it read-only, and the page(s) shared
between multiple EMACS instances, but my memory is foggy on this), and Gene
did that.

	Noel