The Emacsification of Software

Re:The Emacsification of Software by ontouchstart on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @08:15PM (#48129462)

> Even more importantly, what happens to teamwork? If we are all a BBM now—or rather, if we all have personal armies of BBMs, permanently locked in a manic state, springloaded at all hours to generate things for us-and-only-us—how do we work together? How do cocoons communicate, interoperate? What does a team of ai solipsists look like? It sounds oxymoronic.

One example of teamwork is how the programmers and researchers worked together to build the UNIX SYSTEM (https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf). It is not a product but an environment optimized for building tools and solving practical problems with tools written in C (while BBMs were busy with Lisp in Boston .;-)

C++ is a totally different story and you need an IDE for that.

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Re:The Emacsification of Software by olcay_ on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @09:29PM (#48130063)

If WASM succeeded in being the one universal ABI, it could be the perfect successor to the unix pipe for the AI age. Wasm modules for libraries, that double as terminal tools.. One could only imagine

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Re:The Emacsification of Software by zephen on Thursday May 14, 2026 @11:50AM (#48137191)

Before WASM was the CLR.

Before the CLR was the JVM.

Before the JVM was the Smalltalk VM.

Before the Smalltalk VM was the UCSD P-Machine.

Before the UCSD P-Machine was the BCPL O-Code interpreter.

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Re:The Emacsification of Software by davidron on Friday May 15, 2026 @09:15PM (#48155882)

So true.

I think you missed flash. And arguably, to the author's point, JavaScript in browser (not wasm).

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