Talking Out Of Turn

From In the Beginning was the Command Line, but I found it via Tim Bray:

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer–i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed–emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

Why do I love Emacs? Because it is like me, “focused with maniacal intensity” on deceptively simple-seeming problems, and yet full of irrelevant and pointless curiosities and historical baggage, like M-x doctor RET and that sort of thing.

Someday… I will write blogging software in Emacs. Someday.