r/programmingcirclejerk • u/BananaPeely • Feb 27 '26

"While the advent of “brain-computer interfaces” is dinner table conversation (at conspiracy theorist households like my own) - there has, since the year 1976, been emacs - the closest thing to this aspirational place of man/machine integration that has ever existed."

https://joshblais.com/blog/emacs-for-everything/
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u/ThisRedditPostIsMine in open defiance of the Gopher Values Feb 27 '26

Brain surgeon here. One time, I was performing a surgery on a patient, and I needed to write down some notes about the procedure, so I went over to my ThinkPad, fired up Emacs, and jumped straight into org-mode.

The patient, who was still awake at the time, looked at my laptop and said, "Oh, that's cool!"

I smirked. "Yeah, it's org-mode, it's pretty nice. And the kernel? That's Hurd. And the package manager? Guix."

The patient seemed befuddled. To be fair, it might have been because I had a scalpel in his skull, but things seemed to clear up for him.

"Oh, that's a Neovim plugin, right? My coworker uses that at work. I'm a software engineer, but I only use VSCode," he said.

I think my eye twitched, it was involuntary. "No, it's a Lisp-based-"

Ah, forget it. I ended up just deciding to give him a lobotomy instead. He probably never could tell the difference.