ATC is much more impressive than my little story of Emacs in unexpected places...
My research group needed to very rapidly make an interactive piece, for a looming big open house event for sponsors and VIPs. For Reasons, we had trouble getting computers, but there were some ancient ones that didn't run much of anything. I'd been programming in Java heavily before this, but the solution to the immediate emergency of deadline plus resource constraints was... Emacs.
Emacs would run on the box we had available, and, with it, I could develop all the things I needed, including complex HTML generation, even faster than with Perl (which I also knew). I ended up having a new Emacs process exec'd for every request, by Apache CGI, and displaying in Netscape. Process startup of the dumped Emacs itself was fast, and it worked fine.
I don't have that code anymore, but some other non-editor application for which I used Emacs before then was a kind of code generator: https://www.neilvandyke.org/jomtool/ You can see Emacs was supporting objects and even syntax macros, which was very respectable for any programming language at the time, and this was only the extension language of a text editor. What you can't see is that Emacs was additionally a super-productive "IDE" for developing with its own extension language.
My research group needed to very rapidly make an interactive piece, for a looming big open house event for sponsors and VIPs. For Reasons, we had trouble getting computers, but there were some ancient ones that didn't run much of anything. I'd been programming in Java heavily before this, but the solution to the immediate emergency of deadline plus resource constraints was... Emacs.
Emacs would run on the box we had available, and, with it, I could develop all the things I needed, including complex HTML generation, even faster than with Perl (which I also knew). I ended up having a new Emacs process exec'd for every request, by Apache CGI, and displaying in Netscape. Process startup of the dumped Emacs itself was fast, and it worked fine.
I don't have that code anymore, but some other non-editor application for which I used Emacs before then was a kind of code generator: https://www.neilvandyke.org/jomtool/ You can see Emacs was supporting objects and even syntax macros, which was very respectable for any programming language at the time, and this was only the extension language of a text editor. What you can't see is that Emacs was additionally a super-productive "IDE" for developing with its own extension language.