Employee 2-4601 wrote:I genuinely feel that people who don't like Lisp probably haven't spent enough time with Lisp.
I could never claim to be an expert in it, but I did use (among other flavors) GCLISP for a minor project.
Maybe a better claim to fame was that I was the one who found the dusty punched card deck containing an instance of LISP for IBM MVS, which a friend -- who later became Dean of the Computer Science department where we went to school -- used for his Master's thesis project.
Employee 2-4601 wrote:I'll admit that TECO scares me, so I think I'm glad I never used that.
That is wise; TECO really was as insane as everyone says it was.
I used it for a while when I had a DEC PDP-11/04 in my bedroom (don't ask). I stopped using it after it corrupted the original Zork (the one that was later split into three MS-DOS games), even though
I hadn't even edited the game code.
TECO was just a variety of disasters waiting to happen.
Employee 2-4601 wrote:BRIEF sounds interesting; I've not heard of that before. Ah, I see it was a DOS,OS/2,Windows thing. Apparently crisp-mode provides "CRiSP/Brief editor" key bindings in Emacs
(but presumably nothing more than that).
BRIEF's default key-bindings setup was one of the reasons for its popularity. Rather than being modal like EMACS/vi, each function in BRIEF had its own keycommand, with the most common ones being a regular key and the rest using a combination of the Ctrl or Alt key. This meant you didn't have to remember (or look to see) what mode you were in; everything was immediate.
That was one of the contributors to the "direct from brain into file" feeling I mentioned when I was banging out code. BRIEF really was beautifully designed. It's why my editor of choice remains ZEUS, which was a later-PC clone of BRIEF -- it doesn't have the scripting feature, but otherwise it's got the feel of BRIEF with a lot of snazzy modern features added.
(BTW, while I'm not a fan of modal systems myself, including in text editors, of course I understand that people can train themselves to be proficient using them. On the other hand, there were people who claimed that the RPN used in HP calculators was somehow superior to the common-sense infix notation used by Motorola calculators, so I suppose there's no accounting for taste.
)
((And to be extra-clear, I'm just poking a bit of geezergeek fun here. I don't begrudge anyone their editor of choice.))