Nerd Food: My Emacs and I

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Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days. – Marvin Minsky

Circa 1999.

When you are a newbie both to C and to Linux the world is bleak, dark and full of menaces. Every time there is an extremely upsetting bug in a package you use often, say Gnome, you prefer avoiding it rather then solving the problem by re-installing the newest version; pure windows luser logic. And that is what you feel, that you are a natural born luser. 23 years old, computer lover since 12 and you cannot recompile the kernel or even install packages from source: "darn, another dependency problem! But why doesn't it just work? Install Shield does!!". People tell you about the advantages of the command line interface (CLI) and you start crying.

I bet this is a very common picture. You see, I started using linux with RH 5.2 mainly because I was tired of DOS (the whole lot, starting with 3.0 to Windows 98), but also because I felt that I wasn't learning anymore. For Christ sake, if the NIC doesn't work then reinstall Windows and five times out of ten your problem is solved! And why can't I just exit the "Network" applet with an OK without waiting forever when I didn't make any alterations at all? Why reinstalling the same files and rebooting? It was just wrong.

But, just like a kid that lived his entire life in a small town, I was not prepared for the big OS; It was a huge and problematic change. My 486/66 did not like Linux — I never managed to get past the Calibrating delay loop message — and for 6 months I booted from a floppy. My 14'' monitor did only 640x400 in X and most programs at the time weren't made with people like me in mind; for example, while playing FreeCiv I had to move the window to see the bottom of the screen. Nothing compared to those days when you had to install Linux from floppies, the gurus will say, but bear in mind that Windows 95 ran in my machine, in 800x600, and didn't complain a lot. Office 97 was there without a problem.

Still, there was something about this OS… Can't quite put it in words but it definetly had the same flair that my ZX Spectrum or Borland's Turbo Pascal had, a long, long time ago. The fact that I now had in my computer the efforts of thousands of developers, the tools used by the biggest minds in the computing world for their daily hacking was very inspiring; I just couldn't quit and be a standard luser.

And now — when I'm almost reaching my larval stage — I can see why I need to go through this ordeal, probably for years to come. It's because I was living a lie, because I thought I really knew about computers but in fact what I was learning was Microsoft speak, a language designed to take you away from the machine and get you into the world of "easiness". A world where you don't really need to know what you're doing because the wizards do it for you, and where people develop languages without believing the least in them. Where you are a Certified Systems Engineer, but only for 12 months.

Yes, that is the right attitude for the mainstream. After all, they buy the right clothes, the right music, the right tooth paste and the right OS because it is easy, its on the telly. Ken Tilton said it best:

That absolutely terrifies the herd-following, lockstep-marching, mainstream-saluting cowards that obediently dash out or online to scoop up books on The Latest Thing. They learn and use atrocities like Java, C++, XML, and even Python for the security it gives them and then sit there slaving away miserably, tediously, joylously paying off mortgages and supporting ungrateful teenagers who despise them, only to look out the double-sealed thermo-pane windows of their central-heated, sound-proofed, dead-bolted, suffocating little nests into the howling gale thinking "what do they know that I do not know?" when they see us under a lean-to hunched over our laptops to shield them from the rain laughing our asses off as we write great code between bong hits… what was the question?

And if you don't follow the mainstream, you're a rogue, end of story. But us, those who preferred hacking to playing, the ones who were genuiningly curious about the works of the beast, well, we were the betrayed generation. We were not commercially viable — and so, forgotten; we had to content ourselves with the demented GWBASIC while other people were experimenting with C. How many clever minds did humanity loose in this process? We'll never know.

When KDE presented the beta version of their IDE, I sent a post in Slashdot praising them and also asking for some unity between the Gnome and KDE worlds. As some people pointed out, I was terribly wrong. The fact that you can still compile, edit and debug your code from emacs in text mode on a 386 is one of the biggest triumphs of the free software community; its not commercially viable, but then again, freedom is probably not commercially viable. Making things properly is never easy, but that shouldn't stop us from trying since it didn't stop R. Stallman, L. Tordsvalds or M. Khan¹ to name a few, and it's because of them we are now where we are.

The way I see it, if you can't see the advantages of Linux, you were simply not made to be free. End of story.

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