Oops. Meant to send this to this list but sent it privately. Here's a second try:

My supposition is that EMACS was basically Stallman's attempt to bring in all the things he liked about the LISP Machine environment into the Unix world through the back door. The original PDP-10 EMACS really was just a pile of macros which turned TECO into something usable by mere mortals. If all you wanted was an editor that worked the same way as PDP-10 EMACS, it would have been easy to create: several people have (MicroEMACS, etc). It's the fact that GNU EMACS was intended as a haven for MIT LISP hackers adrift in the bold new world of Unix that made it so huge for its time.

Mike

On Feb 26, 2017 8:40 AM, "Tim Bradshaw" <tfb@tfeb.org> wrote:

On 26 Feb 2017, at 12:39, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> I was never happy with the size of EMACS, and it had nothing to do with the
> amount of memory resources used. That big a binary implies a very large amount
> of source, and the more lines of code, the more places for bugs... And it
> makes it harder to understand, for someone working on it (to make a
> change/improvement).

I think whether you think Emacs is large or small depends on what you think it is. If you think it's a text editor it's huge (by the standards of the 1970s, anyway: I have things which purport to be text editors which have python interpreters in and are significantly larger than Emacs, *on my phone*). But if you think of it as the userland of an operating system it's rather small. And many Emacs users do (or did: I used to but don't so much any more) treat it as the latter.