Message-ID: <anews.Aucb.321>
Newsgroups: fa.editor-p
Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
From: C70:editor-people
Date: Tue Jan 19 12:58:11 1982
Subject: exact duplicates

>From reid@Shasta@Sumex-Aim Tue Jan 19 11:17:08 1982
I am absolutely appalled at the thought of investing a man-year or
whatever doing an exact duplicate of any system, let alone one that
has so little global consistency as ITS Emacs. I was a Twenex Emacs
user for many years, and when Gosling's first showed up, I used it
because I had better access to a VAX. After I had used it for 3 months,
you couldn't have @i[paid] me to go back to the first-generation Emacs.
So-called "Real Emacs" is an extremely fine editor, but Gosling's
next-generation editor is a tremendous improvement on it. I certainly hope
that Editor-People is not generally populated with folks who believe that
any editor is good enough that we should be reprogramming exact copies of
it in different languages rather than discussing issues of what makes
editors good and how we can make an existing one better. 

If it is considered an acceptable discussion topic, I would be happy to
prepare a treatise on why I think Gosling's editor is a marked improvement
over Stallman's original, even though it has not yet had the time to mature
and develop the vast collection of libraries and packages. It will have
to wait until after POPL, as I am away from Stanford and my notes right now.

Brian