Speaking of crazy applications of Emacs... Long long time ago, my team was tasked with rebuilding an MBS analytics system for one of the leading fintech companies. The original system ran on DEC VAX and was written in VMS Pascal (let's just say, a very unique flavor of Pascal). Rewriting it from scratch was not an option (it would take decades to implement all that complexity and to make sure it worked correctly). Instead, we utilized a combination of tools that first transformed the Pascal code into the form that was closer to more popular Pascal dialects (which included using a Scheme compiler and (drum roll) Emacs in batch mode), applied a set of hand-made patches, translated into C using p2c, and finally built on Linux. As crazy as it sounds, it worked well enough to be used as a foundation for the next gen of mortgage analytics.

There are times when I wonder if calling GNU Emacs an editor is really descriptive. Editing is just one window, to what's really an integrated Lisp development and runtime environment. Compare some Lisp Machine features to the GNU Emacs features:

Zmacs -> Emacs, Zmail -> Rmail (or Gnus), Symbolics Document Examiner -> Info, Lisp Machine Lisp -> Emacs Lisp (both children of Maclisp). There may be other examples that I'm not aware of.

GNU Emacs might have started as an editor, but it's certainly grown beyond that. Maybe its become a sort of Valinor, a realm for uprooted Lisp machine users to continue the craft.

Emacs in the 2020s is getting better and better as an application platform. Everything is faster thanks to native code compilation. There are multiple frameworks for interaction, including transient, forms-mode, widget.el, probably some others. There's native support for SVG, formatting and styling text, displaying bitmap images, etc. It's cross platform. You could do a lot worse.

I enjoy reading stories like this, considering Emacs is still going today --- and I am a regular!

I use emacs for many programming languages. However, when it came to .NET development (at work) - I had to stick with Visual Studio. I always toyed the idea of Visual Studio Code but, due to some of the projects, it was not easy to do when we were using .NET Framework. Once we were getting closer to .NET Core, however, I knew emacs was becomming a possibility.

My work colleagues see "emacs" on one of my screens at work. They are puzzled why I use it to generate code or do git, etc, with it - but rarely ask questions.

One thing I was surprised about, when we finally moved away from .NET framework to .NET Core (.NET 6 and later) -- I was surprised when one member of the team said he was planning to switch from using Visual Studio.. the IDE, to Visual Studio Code.

I asked why and he said is just likes it behaving more as a text editor than a full development environment. Of course, I understood what he meant by that.

Its weird, especially in microsoft stack land, to hear a .NET developer say this. Truth is -- many seem to be moving to Visual Studio Code. It had to take another Microsoft product to do that, considering we always had vi/vim, emacs, or others like sublime text, etc. Before Visual Studio Code, if I dare mention using a text editor for a .NET project, I would have been given all sorts of puzzled faces. How times change.

Today... while most are still using Visual Studio (IDE).. we now have 2 developers using Visual Studio Code. As for me... I am using:- eglot, company, yasnipet, flycheck, etc... EMACS+Omnisharp!

I even wrote functions to easily create new solutions, projects, unit tests, etc.

Programming is enjoyable with emacs. It makes me happy.

This is pretty much the definition of "cursed".

I'm reminded of the much more positive story from Steve Yegge about a customer service system at Amazon that used Emacs as its UI. Apparently the customer-service reps loved it, and missed using Emacs when the transition was made to an all-new Java app.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

(C-f "When Amazon got its start")

You think that's seedy?

I once used excel & vba as an intranet webserver to collect weekly business analytics using user input into web forms from various departments.

A very little knowledge, no proper resourcing, no support, internal politics determined the effort should fail came together to produce such a "success"

Got a seedy story like that? Seedier than that? Let's hear it!

I see the page has been vandalized; here is a link to the original:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=EmacsStorie...

I don't even understand what was built in emacs. A "message router"? Its job was to take messages in from a set of links and transfer them out some other set of links? How did it know what links led where, or how to make progress towards the final hop? How was the path computed? If TCP/IP was already available as a layer, why not just use its routing capabilities? What was DCE and how did it help?

It's been posted on HN before but it's probably relevant to this thread. Steve Yegge had a post about how Emacs was used heavily inside Amazon's customer support system https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

Emacs as a RAD environment/terminal Visual Basic? Check that off my Emacs bingo board…

Looks like someone deleted the wiki article and replaced it with an insult to hn and a racist slur. This is currently what I see when I navigate to the linked article:

> hn sux, pjals is probably in love with autione. niggers all.

If there are any emacs wiki admins reading this, you might want to look into correcting this.

-- EDIT -- I reached out to #emacs on librechat and it has been reverted.

A bit a digression but the community around #emacs on freenode and emacswiki.org was really wonderful when I was active on it in the early 2000s. Lots of people who were as helpful as they were knowledgeable. ALmost none of the internet trolling and bile that plagues many modern fora and real friendships formed from meeting people online. It's a great throwback to see a page from that site on HN.

i run emacs inside the terminal in vscode so i can have a terminal multiplexer with vim shortcuts clipboard sharing and other weird integrations :)

>Early ‘90s, after “Die Wende”

It was a peaceful revolution. Wende is a term coined by the SED and misleading.

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprachkritik-wer-wende-sagt-s... (in german tho)

Page was vandalized. Not in recent changes, so done with Alex's direct db access.

Speaking about VMS I wonder why did it disappear. It was so bad compared to Unix?

Wow... and now the page is getting vandalized repeatedly. Hard not to believe this isn't related to it making HN.