The People of Emacs are my tribe
The People of Emacs are my tribe, even if I never met anyone of them in person. They are my tribe because I believe that sharing matters, and I feel that they do too. I’ve been able to use and enjoy Emacs all these years because of their generosity, and I hope one day to pay them back.
The People of Emacs have been my tribe since I first watched the video lectures for MIT 6.001 Structure and Intepretation of Computer Programs, and what I saw expressed something I had always felt subconsciously, but had never been able to articulate: that computer use and computer programming were fundamentally the same activity; that coding was closer to casting spells than to doing engineering; and that Lisp was the arcane language of choice for spellbinding the computer.
The People of Emacs are my tribe because the tool that they have created reflects many of the principles I hold about software. Some of those priciples are:
- Software should be free, as in freedom
- Sotware should be programmable, and in the same language it is written in
- Explicit is better than implicit
- Plain text always wins in the long term
- It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures (and that data structure is the cons cell)
The People of Emacs are my tribe, and I hope to meet some of them soon.
This post is my entry for Emacs Carnival for December 2025.