>And unix was originally written on a machine with less than 144 kilobytes of RAM using a teletypewriter...
> What amazing contributions to the world's software have these enormous screens allowed you to make?
A tool is a tool, and is different than a person. When it comes to programming, the person is more important than the tool, but the tool does affect the person. You can theoretically do roughly the same work on any computer with any equivalent application, but certain computers and editors allow you to do such work more quickly.
Just because you can do something using the "wrong tools" doesn't mean that you should. Most of the original Unix was written using ed, too.[1] That doesn't mean that ed ought to be used today unless it is the tool that happens to make you the most productive. A real hacker using ed can program better than a newbie with a modern editor, obviously. That doesn't mean that real hackers should use ed.
ed was used out of necessity. So were teletypes and 144 KB of RAM. Good hackers could still do work with such tools. However, they themselves think that they're more productive with modern tools or else the hackers who used ed back in the day would still be using ed.
I actually do use ed for some quick/light editing because it doesn't get in the way. It's the perfect editor if you never make any mistakes. When you do make mistakes, something like emacs is immensely more useful because of all the ways you can correct your program from within the editor. If I used ed for everything, I would probably have to write dozens of helper scripts (in sh, of course!) to help me edit my source code. In something like emacs, those scripts have already been written and integrated into the editor and this is a good thing. After all, one should not reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.
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I hope you understand what I was getting at in my analogy to ed. You can make amazing contributions using any weak tool, and you can make no contribution at all using a strong tool. This doesn't mean that one should willingly use weak tools unless they have a pretty good reason to do so. People did great things on weak tools in the old days because they had no other choice, not because those tools somehow make someone great. Using ed isn't going to allow me to create the next great operating system.
You can have a powerful computer, or lots of screen space and have those tools be wasted, obviously. The specs of your hardware do not make you more capable of a programmer. On the other hand, to willingly suffer weak tools for ideology shows that rms puts his ideology ahead of his hacking. Otherwise, he would have a setup that is designed to optimize hacking productivity, so that he could do more things in less time. Sure, he could hack great things using just about any device with a Unix terminal and a keyboard, but he could hack in a more productive manner using proper tools.
Using roughly equivalent tools is a matter of taste (e.g. vi and emacs), but he's using a rather weak machine simply out of a desire to have a totally 'free' machine. Ironically, he's limiting his own freedom of choice in hardware for what he believes is total software freedom.
rms is a great hacker. In the domain of programming, he's better, smarter, and more experienced than me. That being said, his uncompromising commitment to his ideology is not getting in the way of me, it's getting in the way of him. There are other groups that inconvenience themselves greatly due to their philosophical beliefs. For instance, the Amish. They don't harm me or even affect me, but they do miss out on a lot of cool stuff by shunning technology. I probably can't persuade someone who is already Amish to go get an awesome smartphone, but if the Amish were actively evangelizing, I would try to discourage other people from giving up the conveniences of modern technology.
Perhaps I should ask what amazing contributions to the world's software rms has done in the last decade as opposed to, say, the 1980s?
I have to grant you a few points.
#1: I've heard RMS complain about his lemote netbook, about it being slow and with a small screen, although I supposed he could attach an external monitor. As far as the lemote netbook, I wouldn't buy one because lemote is an arm of the Chinese government and the loongson processor already has design flaws, and is licensed from MIPS. It beats me why he doesn't use an OpenRISC platform if he wants something just for cli editing with emacs.
#2: RMS seems to have stopped hacking software, so his computing requirements seem to be limited to what's necessary to produce his writing. He also seems to be getting support and service from other people's computers/servers and other people. I'm not sure that any average person would want or be able to do things exactly like him. Since he is trying to be a role model, he should model something that everyone could do and would want to do.
#3: Instinctively I want to say you're probably right that hackers should use the best tools available, and most of them do. However, I've known too many Russian/Finnish hackers who grew up with computers like clones of the sinclair zx80 who would surely not have been as awesome had they started off on supercomputers. Something about the easy availability of resources and lack of simplicity seems to spoil some of the fun. This is why I think so many hackers are drawn to simpler devices like ardunio or embedded microcontrollers.
I'm not sure it's powerful enough to handle one 1080p external screen. It's certainly not powerful enough to handle two. (My desktop can't handle three with its current graphics card and driver.)
I also think that you need X for multi-monitor setups. When I Ctrl+Alt+F2 (C-M-F2 if you are used to emacs) for a console, it just mirrors the screens. Even if you could get it to not mirror, I'm not sure what meaningful advantage you would get over just tiling lots of terminals in a very basic window manager.
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> RMS seems to have stopped hacking software, so his computing requirements seem to be limited to what's necessary to produce his writing. He also seems to be getting support and service from other people's computers/servers and other people. I'm not sure that any average person would want or be able to do things exactly like him.
Yes. Maybe I'm subconsciously being overly critical because he chose to stop hacking and start writing philosophy. Different people obviously have different needs, and those needs are best served by different devices.
That being said, he seems to use his netbook because he has no other choice, not because he wants to. Perhaps the Free Software Foundation (FSF) should spin off a Free Hardware Foundation (FHF) if he wants devices that can run GNU/Linux (as he puts it) without needing any sort of proprietary firmware at all. It seems unhackerish (if that's a word) to just accept circumstances rather than to try to build your way out of them. I'd gladly use a FHF motherboard/CPU for the next box I build if they were decent -- and if they existed!
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> However, I've known too many Russian/Finnish hackers who grew up with computers like clones of the sinclair zx80 who would surely not have been as awesome had they started off on supercomputers. Something about the easy availability of resources and lack of simplicity seems to spoil some of the fun.
Yes. I hate it when classes "teach" programming with IDEs that think (and code) for you. I took a class that required the use of Eclipse, so I went ahead and coded in emacs anyway. It's very vital to build up things like muscle memory (from basic editors that don't get in your way) and resourcefulness (from poor hardware) if you want to get good at programming. It's easier to learn a good concept out of necessity than just because you've been told that it's good.
That being said, once you've learned how to do something hard, if you don't want to do it again you shouldn't have to. The best environments for learning might not be the same as the best environments for use once you know what you're doing. (Although I would, in my biased opinion, think that something like emacs comes close. It doesn't get in your way or try to think for you like a "modern" IDE, and yet it has lots of depth if you know the right commands or download the right extensions. It seems to encourage learning to obtain more functionality, rather than just having menus upon menus. I'm not opposed in principle to IDEs, but none of them seem to have sane, minimalist defaults. It's a sad state of modern software where an example of bloat in the 1980s is now an example of minimalism today.)
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> This is why I think so many hackers are drawn to simpler devices like ardunio or embedded microcontrollers.
It's also just fun to build things. I'm looking forward to the Raspberry Pi. I don't know what I'm going to do with it when I get it, but I'm sure I'll find some use for hardware that inexpensive.
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P.S. I hope I'm not giving the impression that I hate rms. I wouldn't be so picky here if I thought that his end goal wasn't worth achieving.
>>It seems unhackerish (if that's a word) to just accept circumstances rather than to try to build your way out of them. I'd gladly use a FHF motherboard/CPU for the next box I build if they were decent -- and if they existed!
Even the bus architecture is open and the processor itself can be debugged or modified. As other people have mentioned, there is coreboot (coreboot.org) for a number of other platforms.
And unix was originally written on a machine with less than 144 kilobytes of RAM using a teletypewriter...
What amazing contributions to the world's software have these enormous screens allowed you to make?