For those of you who aren’t familiar with Org Mode, here’s a bit of the back story. Carsten Dominik, an astronomer, originally wrote Org Mode as a small extension to outline-mode to help with his note taking and list management but along the way it grew into a Swiss Army Knife. Eventually, Dominik wanted to spend more time on his research so the maintenance fell to Bastien Guerry who managed development until recently when he turned it back over to Dominik.
As part of her series of chats with Emacs luminaries, Sacha Chua had an interesting discussion with Guerry. I had always assumed that Guerry was also a scientist and an experienced hacker but it turns out that he’s actually a philosopher who is very modest about his programming skills and claims that Emacs Lisp is the only language he really knows. As with all of Chua’s chats, this one is interesting and engaging.
One of the things I really like is how “an ordinary guy1” was able to learn Elisp and take over development of a very complex Emacs package. It shows, again, that Emacs isn’t just for programmers; everyone can participate and benefit.
The talk is a little over 50 minutes so plan accordingly. But do plan to take a look. It’s an interesting chat and you’ll probably learn a bit about the history of Org Mode.
Footnotes:
1 By which I mean not a programmer or someone trained in what we now call the STEM fields. Guerry is hardly ordinary in his accomplishments or contributions to Emacs and Org Mode.