Re: How old are Emacs users?

[Bill White]

On Apr 24, 12:07 am, 30ish emacs user <kalap.ka...@freemail.hu> wrote:
> I'm wondering which age group most Emacs users fall into? How old are
> you? I'm 32.

I'm 40.

> I suppose most of the youngest generation were exposed to some kind of
> graphical editor like Visual Studio or Eclipse and they find Emacs
> alien (those who don't understand...) after using the former.
>
> The older generations were more probable to be exposed to vim or emacs
> first and they "stuck" with it (know the advantages), not migrating to
> graphical editor land.

I started on Macintoshes in a typesetting company in 1991 at age 25.
The first decent text editor I used on the Mac was Qued/M on the
recommendation of TeX guru Art Ogawa, who spent a few weeks at our
company gettting us set up with TeX; I later moved on to Pete
Keleher's TCL-based Alpha.  Meanwhile I had fallen in love with emacs
thanks to Ed Reingold's calendar package, but the only version I had
access to was Marc Parmet's old Mac port of 18.59, which (IIRC) didn't
have a lisp interpreter.  Or I didn't have a chance to get into lisp.
It's hard to remember.

When I started working at my present job in 1996 (age 30) I was on an
old NeXT slab that had emacs - which I had long loved with an
unrequited love - and I decided to learn by total immersion: I would
do *everything* in emacs!  The manual became my bathroom and mealtime
companion, and now 11 years later I still do most everything in or
through emacs (except this dang gmail stuff).

Hmm... this is more of a conversion story - it might be more
appropriate in alt.religion.emacs :-)

Looking back on all this, it's good to note how the names have stayed
with me - I feel a deep gratitude to Art, Pete, Ed and Marc for
writing their software and answering questions.

bw
--
Bill White . minutiae@gmail.com . http://minutiae.stblogs.org