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by e40 5050 days ago
This is just silly. Emacs isn't an OS. It provides an API to some library and system calls, but it isn't even multi-threaded.

If your comment was meant as a hat tip to the Symbolics Genera system, that was a full-fledged OS, then there could be debate. I love Lisp and would dearly love to customize my Jelly Bean experience with it, but then we'd need to get into a discussion of what is really better, and 80's OS or Android.

2 comments

I took it as more of a nod to the old emacs joke (probably told by a vim user): “Emacs is a great operating system; too bad it doesn’t have a decent editor”
IIRC, one of the original goals of Emacs was to replicate the environment of Lisp machines. With that in mind, it could be considered an OS not unlike Smalltalk environments such as Squeak.
IIRC, one of the original goals of Emacs was to replicate the environment of Lisp machines.

No, that was Stallman working for LMI reproducing all of the Symbolics environment, because he was pissed that MIT sold the rights to work done in the AI lab to Symbolics.