21 Jul
2025
21 Jul
'25
3 p.m.
On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 10:36:49AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 10:13???AM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
But I was never a LISP hacker on the PDP-10s. We primarily used SAIL and
BLISS, so I suspect that's why, when I finally had the chance to switch to
UNIX and learned EX, I decided it was too much trouble. There were just
too many commands and weird sequences to learn again; I wasn't as good with
it, so I gave up.
Please don't take this as an insult, Clem, you know I respect the heck out
of you. And we've shown to have similar approaches to a lot of stuff,
so in my view, maybe we have similar brains. At least in my case, I
don't consider myself to be as smart as most of the really smart people
I've worked with. In order to keep up, I had to work harder than they
appeared to work.
I'm wondering if maybe us "less smart" people, just don't have the
extra
cycles it takes to love emacs? Is it possible that if we had cycles to
spare, we'd like emacs too? Is it possible that it takes more cycles to
run emacs effortlessly? Maybe we like vi because it takes less of our
brain so there is more left over for the actual work we are trying to do?
And I don't consider myself or Clem to be not smart, we've both done a
lot that shows intelligence. But I absolutely do not consider myself to
be the smartest of the smart, not even close. On the last team I built,
all of the core of that team were crazy smart, way, way ahead of me.
It was hard work to keep up with them and I didn't always keep up.
One of them read string theory papers in his spare time "for fun" he said.
Bigger brain than mine for sure.
--lm