Development quotes of the week

Emacs has flickered for 30 years. Now, it should be flicker-free. I’ve just landed support for double-buffered rendering for the X11 port. Now you should be able to edit, resize, and introduce bugs in your awful codebase without seeing a partially-rendered buffer or being incited to murder by barely-perceptible white flashes while editing that disappear when you look at them.

You might say, “That’s great, but double-buffered rendering is the textbook solution to the problem of displaying incomplete rendering to users and driving them to kill their dogs in maniacal frustration.”. That’s true, but Emacs predates those textbooks. GNU Emacs is an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype. Compiling Emacs is a challenge. Adding modern rendering features to the redisplay engine is a miracle.

The pad was overflowing with random ether-noise and flotsam, with people all writing random stuff and remixing and talking over top of each other. I explained at the top of the pad that the link had been tweeted in error, and apologized for the mistake — but of course…. it’s an etherpad! People erased my message and just wrote over top of it. It filled with a cacophonous rainbow-colored torrent of ether-junk, a bubbling petrie dish of speech that pulsed and warbled and mutated all over itself.

How exciting. So the official tarball of GNU hello is not the preferred form for modification!

Personally I think a Linux kernel tarball, without accompanying git history, is a GPL violation. But I don't expect to convince anyone...