teco added to ports - Fwd: FreshPorts daily new ports

[Kevin Kinsey]

>
>
>On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 19:18 -0800, Joshua Tinnin wrote:
>  
>
>>Wow ... teco is finally in FreeBSD ports. Now I have the option of
>>easily installing an editor that causes ulcers and premature aging even
>>faster than ed does!
>>

Marc Ramirez wrote:

>TECO is worthless.  I'm holding out for EDT.
>
>Marc.
>  
>

And not the Emacs emulation, I suppose?  ROFL.  But surely you
and highly informed and aware of the allure of TECO.

(If you've read the "Real Programmers" stuff and have work to do,
just delete this one now....)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Text Editing

In some companies, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers
standing in line to use an 029 keypunch. In fact, the building I work
in doesn't contain a single keypunch. The Real Programmer in this
situation has to do his work with a "text editor" program. Most systems
supply several text editors to select from, and the Real Programmer
must be careful to pick one that reflects his personal style. Many
people believe that the best text editors in the world were written
at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for use on their Alto and Dorado
computers [3]. Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would ever use
a computer whose operating system is called SmallTalk, and would
certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse.

Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated
into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems -
EMACS and VI being two. The problem with these editors is that Real
Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as
bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No the Real Programmer
wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor - complicated, cryptic,
powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.

It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely
resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the
more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in
as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible
typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program,
or even worse - introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working 
subroutine.

For this reason, Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit a program
that is close to working. They find it much easier to just patch the binary
object code directly, using a wonderful program called SUPERZAP (or its
equivalent on non-IBM machines). This works so well that many working
programs on IBM systems bear no relation to the original FORTRAN code.
In many cases, the original source code is no longer available. When it
comes time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of
sending anything less than a Real Programmer to do the job - no Quiche
Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is 
called "job security".

(Copied from the first hit at Google.)

Kevin Kinsey