Once upon a time in the early '80s after Pike had left Caltech and went to Bell Labs, some of us undergraduates who had been hired part time to do the system programming and admin stuff Pike had handled were sitting around talking about editors. We mostly used the Toronto version of QED that Pike had worked on when he was there and had brought to Caltech.
As often happens when programmers discuss tools, the conversation soon turned to bragging about how we could obviously write better versions. In this case it was about how we could write a great screen editor.
At some point that afternoon it went beyond just general bragging for Karl Heuer and myself--we were directly claiming we could each write a much better editor that the other and it was time to put up or shut up. We sat down at terminals at opposite sides of the room and started writing.
We wrote all night, only stopping for trips to the soda machine and the candy machine, and only speaking when it was to boast of some milestone, or to top the other's boast. "I've got string searcing working!" "So? I had that 30 minutes ago...now I've got pattern searching".
Sometime around maybe 3 AM or so we confident enough to be using our editors to edit their own source code.
When Normal Wilson, another one of the undergraduates doing the system programming there, got in and found what we had been doing he mentioned it in an email to Pike.
Pike's response? I don't remember the exact words, but the gist of it was:
> Everybody writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful.
What is the contemporary equivalence of this? A front-end framework? A WYCIWYG web builder would be an equivalence to an editor I guess but I don't think it's that interesting.
