I recall reveal years ago, I hung out in a forum where the users where very pendantic about claiming emulation only refers to hardware level emulation, like on an FPGA, and everything else was simulation.

Interestingly, I’ve never heard that anywhere else since.

This reminds me of a hardcore Scheme fan I once knew who was really mad about JavaScript so he would only ever call it ECMAScript.

Hackers have always been fond of pedantry:) It's like how I got really annoyed by people calling the whole OS "Linux", so now I typically refer to "NT, Darwin, and GNU/Linux" out of sheer spite. (I'm aware that this is not helpful to anyone, and I do scale it to make sure everyone can still understand each other, but as personal flaws^wquirks go I think I'm doing just fine;])

Oh I’ve run into this too, from trollish standards maximalists in the late 90s on IRC. They thought it was super hilarious to be overbearingly pedantic about W3C specs and such to random people.

I've heard the opposite since the term software emulation has its roots in mimicking architectures in software but full blown virtualization simulates the entire system in software.