Transgressing the boundaries

16 Aug, 2026

I once greatly upset someone online by making a nerdy joke about a text editor. I didn't mean to; his reaction came as a surprise to me, which is why it stuck with me all this time.

I should probably explain what a text editor is. A text editor is something like Microsoft Word, except it caters to the needs of the kind of people who need to edit large amounts of source code and configuration files and want to do so as efficiently as possible.

Back in the last millennium, the two main camps were vi and Emacs. These are not just two different pieces of software, they represent two philosophies: Emacs is a sort of heavy lumbering behemoth that takes ages to start up and offers endless customisation, whereas vi is the small, agile precision tool that is famously hostile to new users but can work wonders in the hand of an expert, and is more or less the same everywhere. Emacs is somewhere that you spend all day in; vi is a tool that you whip out when you need it.

Emacs is in theory much more flexible, because it is structured in such a way that it provides a layer of basic functionality, like drawing text on the screen, managing open files, etc. The editor functionality is built on top of this in a programming language that it implements, which makes it easy to extend and modify.

I was riffing a little on the idea -- not of my own invention -- that Emacs, due to the way that it is structured, could be viewed not just as an application program but as an operating system in itself.¹ Operating systems after all do much the same thing, but one level down, as it were.

To me, this was a harmless and amusing notion: seeing one thing in terms of another, playing with levels of abstraction, and so on.

Our interlocutor did not see things this way. He became irate. In his view, there was only one definition of the term "operating system", and I was bending this definition in an unacceptable way.

This caught me by surprise at the time, but I have found since then that people can get a little funny about the idea of transgressing definitions.

I have a suspicion that some of the unease that some people feel about transgender people is due to this vague unspoken notion that you are somehow not allowed to transfer from one category from another.

I think these are the same people who think of "the disabled" as an entirely separate category of humans, even though anyone can join their ranks in literally the blink of an eye.