Page:Sacha Chua - Emacs Chat with Carsten Dominik.djvu/3

 extremely long release cycle. XEmacs was much more happening, so I was doing that.

I'm really a guy who–I hate repetitive task. If you ask me to do something, if I can find a way to write a program to do it and that will not take more than twice the time to do it by hand, I will go with the programming because I just hate that so much, to do something repetitive. Just started writing little things. Initially mostly also LaTeX and tech-related, because this was how I was writing my stuff. It sounded like this is the most useful stuff.

In a way, with my Emacs programming, it's really scratch-my-own-itch approach. All over these years, I've written really a huge amount of Emacs code. It was always something which I needed, then in a way it got out of hand because it was so much fun. If you get feedback from a community–I'm sure you'll know that exactly from your Planner times–you can easily get carried away.

Sacha: You've definitely gotten carried away, it seems. Everyone I talked to, they're like… Org is really something that's taking over people's lives, and it's worked its way into how they work. That's fantastic.

Carsten: Yes. It's really amazing to hear from real-world people who actually use it. At some point you only think that there's this kind of geeky group of followers which we have, but then you find out that the guy next door is giving a course about reproducible research, and wants to talk about Org Mode and stuff like this. This can be a lot of fun.

Sacha: Yes. Reproducible research, literate configuration, and a lot of other things are coming out of this. What are some of the other unusual or awesome things you've heard about in terms of people using your code?

Carsten: If you're now talking about Org Mode in particular, I think this reproducible research stuff is really great. In particular, these code embedding and code evaluation things is something which actually totally took me by surprise. I would have never thought about this. I think I actually implemented, sort of, putting in examples and maybe source code snippets with some highlighting, because I thought that look nice.

But then Eric Schulte came along and just ran with it, and together it was done. DavidsonDavison [sic] implemented all these execution stuff, which I would never have thought about. It was completely new for me. That is awesome. And then the other thing which is being worked on right now in Org Mode, I think a lot, is