I know I’ve written about this before but someone posted a link to a transcript of RMS’s 2002 speech on Lisp and the development of Emacs. It’s an interesting read. Along the way RMS tells the heartbreaking story of the destruction of the MIT AI Lab and the resulting war between Symbolics and Lisp Machines Incorporated (LMI). He tells the now famous story of his independently reimplementing every change Symbolics introduced so that LMI would have them too.
RMS eventually tired of punishing Symbolics and realized that if he wanted to recreate the camaraderie of the AI Lab he was going to have to build a new, free (in the GNU sense) operating system. He was tempted by Lisp but realized that the hardware wasn’t available to support such an endeavor so GNU, as we know it today, was born.
The two parts of his talk that I liked the best are, first, his recounting of the early history of Emacs and its genesis in the TECO editor. The second part I liked was his explanation of why having an embedded Lisp interpreter in programs like Emacs is such a win. His dream of having Guile scheme being a target language for other languages’ compilers didn’t bear fruit and neither, mostly, did the idea of having Guile be a universal extension language. That’s too bad, especially considering what we got instead.
In any event, if you care at all about the history of Emacs and GNU, this presentation is worth reading.