75 slides to convey an impression which could have been spelled out in a paragraph or two...

Anyone with a slow connection knows what I'm upset about.

Needless to say, I quit when I was about 24 slides into the presentation.

What's awesome is how all of us can probably attribute similar life changes to various software discoveries.

Though it's much weaker than saying "emacs influenced the massively adopted programming language I went on to write"...in many ways, having a computer that, as is - was unable to run Doom - led me to understand good old autoexec.bat and config.sys, what extended memory and himem.sys were, mouse drivers, etc, etc.

On the emacs front - emacs lead me to realize how useless the capslock key was, rebind it to Ctrl on all of my computers, and forever make numerous typing mistakes whenever I use someone else's keyboard :) Worth it.

Good little read.

As a Lisp implementation Emacs Lisp was pretty primitive then:

    * primitive GC
    * only dynamic binding (Stallman sold that as a feature)
    * no nested functions
    * no threads
    * no object system
    * no namespaces for symbols
    * implementation not independent from the editor
    * no TCO
    * slow

The 'eight megabytes and constantly swapping' thing now is also of less importance. ;-)

Someone told me this is called "Takahashi method"[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method

Ah, that explains Ruby's concurrency situation.

(It's a joke, I understand the difficulty involved with concurrency in interpreted languages. But given that both Elisp and Ruby are well-known for having trouble with threading, well, too hard to pass up!)

i think people are being too harsh on this presentation, and focused too much on the form factor and number of slides , instead of the actual content and message

i like the human factor in it, like how random and incidental stuff like being able to complete ruby-mode.el had such a high impact on ruby's syntax

and how learning a text editor inside out, eventually led to ruby, which let to RoR , most people would consider learning so much about emacs as a waste of time, for matz it helped him made ruby

this presentation is more about our human nature , this is i believe a great exmaple of when doing what you love is more important that doing whats important or what you think is right, i like it

Matz gave this presentation at LibrePlanet 2012 in Boston. This talk was the reaason that I decided to give Emacs a shot after being a Vim user for a couple of years. I have used Emacs every day since.

I talked briefly with Matz afterwards and he was very friendly and pleasant to chat with.

There should be audio of this presentation to go along with the slides somewhere, but I couldn't quickly locate it.

The fact the Ruby syntax was mostly derived by what could be made to have auto-indentation in regex in a week in emacslisp is interesting. More than that, it's interesting that Matz seems to ascribe a lot of Ruby's success to it.

    If I couldn't make ruby-mode to work the syntax of 
    Ruby would have changed to more C-like one too 
    similar to other scripting languages as a result, 
    Ruby would not have gained current popularity

Self admittedly, I'm a newb at coding but I've tried emacs and am not a fan. I get the benefits of being able to debug and execute code immediately in the REPL, but I would much rather write code in sublime text or any other text editor. The last thing I want to do when I'm writing code is try to remember some obscure combination of keys in order to perform a simple backspace or copy and paste a line of code. Have not been convinced otherwise yet, maybe someone here can better enlighten me

It's hard to go bad on this article given the source, no?

I find it more interesting for insight into Matz than anything about emacs. The idea that his text editor got him excited about programming is pretty powerful. Yes it could have been written in a 1 page memo, but who cares?

Anyone know if the Emacs source code still is a "good read"? …or has it grown too much

Is there a video of this presentation somewhere? Would love to see it.

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He says he understood the power of Lisp, yet he made a non-Lisp language. :P I don't get people who make non-Lisp languages.

'then i started using ruby' subconsciously presses >> 'thank you.'

vim is amazing indeed. changed my life too.

That was really really annoying and pointless. Why has this been up voted?