EmacsWiki: Emacs Stories (original) (raw)
Stories of Emacs in the wild.
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Emacs being used as a message router in Germany's air traffic control systems for a time in the 1990s
As recounted on r/emacs by Cees de Groot:
Early ‘90s, after “Die Wende” and the unification of East and West Germany. I was the person that got sent to the tough jobs, or the ones that nobody else wanted, so I found myself one Monday morning checking in at a DASA plant (DASA was first German Aerospace, then Daimler Aerospace, and now a part of Airbus). The project was between DASA and HP as main contractors to replace both countries’ ATC systems with a unified one. So we have two megacompanies and a government contract, and shops like my employer getting some juicy partial jobs. And there are actually two Emacs stories in here.
First: that Monday morning, I check in with the developers that I’m supposed to help out. They are in a lab surrounded with wonderful stuff - the newest HP workstations on HP/UX, and a bunch of HP’s top-of-the-range servers, fridge sized and close to 7 figures list price. The reason I got called in though: they couldn’t work on the systems. They were VMS developers, pulled off a different project, and supposed to code up some part of the whole system (I forgot which one) in C on VMS (a truly gross idea, because C was not very well adapted to VMS, but that’s a different thing). Anyway, they got their workstations, manuals, were told that vi was the editor, and have a nice day.
Here we are: a dozen people struggling to type code in Vi. And it’s not that they were stupid, but muscle memory for the VMS editor (TPU, IIRC, but this is a long time ago) does really not translate well to Vi.
I went back home (was closer than the office), loaded all the GNU sources on a QIC tape, went back, and started a routine that was all too well known back in the day: compile the GNU toolchain on some vendor Unix in order to be able to compile the nice utilities, including Emacs. GCC took the longest, you need three or four build stages before you have a reliable compiler, but a day later I had Emacs on HP/UX. It was downhilll from there: I did VMS work, so I whipped up a little init.el that mapped to the VMS editor as closely as possible, and rolled it out to the workstations. A short briefing later and, well, they almost hugged me 😊.
Some weeks later I got called to our second office, they were behind schedule and needed an extra pair of hands. We had - for reasons I don’t know - ATC workstations on microVAXen running that 4GL on VMS but they struggled with getting messaging over the network going - the 4GL was terminal oriented, did not know what a network was, but ATC messages (like airplane hand-overs from airfield to airfield or to Eurocontrol) needed to go to the local message router and from there to the site the message was destined for. We’re talking “no internet” here - all X.25 and leased lines and zero convenience.
Well, I got to work and figured out that it was easier to make VMS talk TCP/IP than HP/UX talk DECnet, so I got that setup, and then picked the hot new tech, DCE, to do the messaging. I did C extentions for the 4GL a lot, so the VMS side was done in a couple of days. Then they told me to talk to Herr Doktor So-and-so who was responsible for the actual message router.
In Germany, a Herr Doktor is always right (they have forgiven Moses by now for not having space on the stone tablets, but it really is the 11th Commandment). This one worked at Symbolics before so knew one programming language: Lisp. He wanted to code the message router in Lisp because of the “complex” (meh) requirements, but there was no Lisp (or no Lisp in budget) for HP/UX so he was stuck. I told him about Emacs, gave him my tape with the ports, and maybe that was a mistake ;-)
A week later - I helped out finishing the 4GL UI in the meantime and completed the messaging protocol - he called me in, quite happy. He showed me the code - page after page of Emacs Lisp, with exactly zero comments “because Lisp is self-documenting”. I got scared, it was an air traffic control system after all, but I was no Herr Doktor so I whipped up the DCE native code for Emacs, made a hack to have it start headless in message router server mode, and we got messages to flow. I did a code hand-over, and drove back home a couple of days later. The “self-documenting” code, as far as I know, landed in production so at least for a while, all ATC message routing in Germany was done through Emacs.
Pro tip: don’t look in the kitchen when governments brew up safety critical systems. I was scared to fly over Germany for a while…
Emacs in batch mode used to "transpile" VMS Pascal to modern Pascal
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40426453 :
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.
Emacs as a Customer-Email Processing Application used by Customer Service at Amazon
From https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel :
The original brilliant guys and gals here only allowed two languages in Amazon’s hallowed source repository: C and Lisp.
Go figure.
They all used Emacs, of course. Hell, Eric Benson was one of the authors of XEmacs1. All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. Not the great gal in the cube next to you. Not Fred, the amazing guy down the hall. I’m talking about the greatest software developers of our profession, the ones who changed the face of the industry. The James Goslings, the Donald Knuths, the Paul Grahams2, the Jamie Zawinskis, the Eric Bensons. Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way smart to use it well, and it makes you incredibly powerful if you can master it. Go look over Paul Nordstrom’s shoulder while he works sometime, if you don’t believe me. It’s a real eye-opener for someone who’s used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs their whole career.
Emacs is the 100-year editor.
Shel, Eric, Greg, and others like them that I wasn’t fortunate enough to work with directly: they didn’t allow C++ here, and they didn’t allow Perl. (Or Java, for that matter). They knew better.
Now C++, Java and Perl are all we write in. The elders have moved on to greener pastures too.
Shel wrote Mailman in C, and Customer Service wrapped it in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp. You don’t know what Mailman is. Not unless you’re a longtime Amazon employee, probably non-technical, and you’ve had to make our customers happy. Not indirectly, because some bullshit feature you wrote broke (because it was in C++) and pissed off our customers, so you had to go and fix it to restore happiness. No, I mean directly; i.e., you had to talk to them. Our lovely, illiterate, eloquent, well-meaning, hopeful, confused, helpful, angry, happy customers, the real ones, the ones buying stuff from us, our customers. Then you know Mailman.
Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for … four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it.
People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I’m not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we’d spent years developing) still just wasn’t doing it for them.
It was truly surreal. I think they may have spiked the eggnog.
Shel’s a genius. Emacs is a genius. Even non-technical people love Emacs. I’m typing in Emacs right now. I’d never voluntarily type anywhere else. It’s more than just a productivity boost from having great typing shortcuts and text-editing features found nowhere else on the planet. I type 130 to 140 WPM, error-free, in Emacs, when I’m doing free-form text. I’ve timed it, with a typing-test Emacs application I wrote. But it’s more than that.
Emacs has the Quality Without a Name.
We retired Mailman. That’s because we have the Quality With a Name — namely, Suckiness. We suck. We couldn’t find anyone who was good enough at Emacs-Lisp to make it work. Nowadays it would be easy; Amazon’s filled up with Emacs Lisp hackers, but back then, CS Apps couldn’t get the time of day from anyone, so they did what they could with what they had, and there weren’t enough Emacs-Lisp folks. For a while, they even had Bob Glickstein on contract, the guy who wrote the O’Reilly “giraffe” book Writing Gnu Emacs Extensions, sitting there writing Gnu Emacs Extensions for Mailman in this little office in the Securities building.