How many times have you seen articles about Emacs or VI on the front page of HackerNews? Computer people are crazy. I know because I’m one of them. We salivate for tiling window managers with dark-themed terminals running on niche Unix systems.
Some things just feel very good to us, like learning all the features in Emacs or typing very fast on a clunky keyboard. Also, code optimization: we love code that “run fast”, even if it takes ten times longer to write it. We must have some low-RAM induced PTSD from the time when memory was measured in KB. We love compiled C code and indulging in the root of all evil: optimization.
This is partly explained by the aesthetics developed in hacker and sci-fi movies from the 80s or 90s. In part also because computers have been the safe harbour, the promised land of nerds, misfits, the un-normal subjects.
I guess that some of the “Black Terminal Aesthetic” has to do with feeling good at something: if I’m typing arcane bright green commands on a dark terminal, I must be good at something. It’s a good feeling, I like that feeling. I suspect AI is coming for that feeling, and I feel the urge to defend it. Sometimes, when I hear overblown AI news, my first reaction is to become Luddite computer enthusiast: a technological oxymoron. I want AI to fail, so I can go back to not remembering Bash syntax, while actually, I don’t need it anymore, because GPT tools can generate most Bash scripts for me.
The coming generation of computer programmers may not know what a terminal is. They will iteratively prompt computers in a natural language, like in Asimov’s novels. They will “chat away” most tasks and Programming will get easier. Some say it will disappear completely, but maybe it will just get more accessible. For sure, we can still learn Emacs if we like it, it’s just even more unnecessary than it ever was.