aliquote.org

April 15, 2020

Emacs (like Smalltalk) has no barriers except at its low-level foundations. Emacs users can change, and break, anything they like. Emacs packages made available for download can potentially contain very malicious code. The Emacs philosophy, going back to the 1970s when there were neither cybercriminals nor completely tech-naive users, is that Emacs users are fully responsible for managing their Emacs environment. This actually works very well in practice, even today, because Emacs is neither attractive for completely tech-naive users, nor sufficiently popular to be an interesting target for cybercriminals. — The most successful malleable system in history