Stallman gives up on Emacs development
32 years of coding over
Tuesday, 26 February 2008, 07:14
AFTER 32 years running the GNU Emacs text editor project Free-Software-its-not-Linux-or-Open-Sauce guru Richard Stallman is giving up his role as its maintainer.
Stallman said now he has a life, he has got too busy to give Emacs maintenance the attention it deserves. Apparently he has been thinking about handing over the maintainership of GNU Emacs for about a year.
He said he feels nostalgic about the code, but really has a life and is not too sorry to see it go.
Control of the project will go to Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong are two of the main Emacs developers.
Stallman first wrote GNU Emacs in 1984, although he had not been the maintainer all the time.
More here. µ
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2008 - 1984 = 24 years. Where's the 32 years coming from?
How can somebody spend 34 years on a project started in 1984? Does he have FOSS TARDIS too?
While GNU Emacs was started in 1984, RMS made a 'prototype' eight years earlier, in 1976, that's the reason for the apparent discrepancy. The first 'emacs' was a set of macros for TECO, a popular programmers' editor back then.
Its almost right if you think of the 32 as being an octal number. (Octal was very popular back in the days -- everyone was running their 'ixes' on DEC hardware or something similar.)(I hated it, BTW. Always been a hex man myself.)
24 Man years = 34 Dork years. Mans live longer than Dorks does.
I felt an unusual surge of profanity upon reading this article.

I mean, how on Earth can anyone spend more then three decades developing and maintaining a bloody TEXT EDITOR ?!!
Frankly, the more I think about it, the more I feel that anyone spewing nonsense about Emacs and how "superior" it is is nothing more than a Macaddict with the wrong obsession.

32 years. For Heaven's sake, what a waste of time.