April 26, 2016 emacs

'(Who Uses Emacs?)

It has been a difficult decision to consider moving to Emacs. Besides discovering that it had some superpowers that Vim lacked, I had a niggling feeling that most of my programming heroes were already using Emacs. So I did some digging around to see who were the luminaries.

The digging turned up that the following all use Emacs. (Sorry for not recording many references.)

Language Creators

  • Rich Hickey (Clojure creator)

  • Joe Armstrong (Erlang creator)

  • Xavier Leroy (OCaml creator)

  • Matz (Ruby creator)

  • Guido van Rossum (GvR, Python creator)

  • Donald Knuth (TeX, Algo books)

  • Michael Widenius (MySQL creator)

  • Guy Steele (creator of many languages)

  • James Gosling (Java creator)

  • Peter Norvig

Miscellaneous Celebrities

  • Eric Raymond (ESR)

  • Richard Stallman (RMS)

  • Jamie Zawinsky (JWZ)

  • Linux Torvalds (Creator of Linux, uses micro-emacs)

  • Neal Stephenson (author)

  • Steve Yegge

  • Avdi Grimm (and other Ruby Rogues)

  • Vernor Vinge

More mentioned: Norvig, Andreesen, Guy Steele, Martin Fowler, Knuth, Julian Assange

And, 45% of Clojure devs use Emacs, accoring to the recent survey.

Who (surprisingly) does not use Emacs

Paul Graham (lisp hacker) — vim

Larry Wall — vim

Rob Pike — acme

Brendan Eich — vim