By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .
Read the story of Richard Stallman (GNU), John Ousterhout (Tcl), Jamie W Zawinski (Netscape, XEmacs), who injured their hands seriously because of typing on keyboard.
(Repetitive Strain Injury), in particular, due to use of emacs.
Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation Founder
Richard Stallman’s RSI is well known during the 1990s.
I remember reading about it somewhere on his website in the 1990s, perhaps on gnu.org, but i couldn’t find it now.
At one point, i remember that he is trying to switch to a voice system.
Fast forward twenty years and I was working 12-16 hours a day hacking on the GNU C++ compiler with more than 100,000 lines of code to my name, and loving every minute of it.
One weekend I visited Richard Stallman at MIT and I was shocked to learn that he could no longer type.
He was given strict instructions by his doctor to not touch a computer keyboard for 6-12 months, and that if he did, he may lose forever his ability to type.
He was a programming pioneer, and at the time, his symptoms were not well known or understood.
We all came to understand that it was RSI—repetitive stress injury, exacerbated by the very keystroke combinations that made the Emacs editor such a powerful programming environment.
But the root cause was not Emacs—it was the punative design of the QWERTY keyboard, a legacy of the industrial era when complex keyboard mechanisms were not able to keep up with the speed of human fingers. …[Which Keyboard? By Michael Tiemann. At
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13507_3-9732586-18.html, accessed on 2010-06-28 ]
Note: Michael Tiemann was a founder of Cygnus (Cygwin), then later was CEO of Redhat when Redhat bought it.
Michael Tiemann blamed QWERTY, but actually, more than 50% of typing by programers is not letters but keyboard shortcuts.
See:
- Emacs Command Frequency Statistics
- Bad Advice on Typing and Keyboard from Programers
- Dvorak Keyboard Layout, My Experience
Jamie W Zawinski
Jamie Zawinski is the main developer of XEmacs, when it was called Lucid Emacs around 1992.
Richard Stallman blames Jamie for the emacs/xemacs schisim.
Jamie is also well known for being the main developer of Netscape browser when the web started in 1990s.
Jamie keeps a diary on computer, before there’s a word “blog”, and in his writings scattered around his diaries he has talked about his hand injury situation, in his dot com work-to-death years.
Here are quotes from his writings online:
For several years I had pretty severe wrist pain, and it terrified me.
I had these visions of me with withered stumps at the ends of my arms, trying to limp along using speech-recognition software, and my career being over.[my wrists and welcome to them By Jamie Zawinski. At [ http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wrists.html ] , accessed on 2011-12-31 ]
My hands have been really been hurting lately; I hope all this typing hasn’t finally blown out my wrists.
If I can’t type, my life is over.
My right hand especially is flaking out — the last knuckle of the middle two fingers ache, as if they’re badly bruised.
I guess it’s time to figure out how to use our medical program.
As if a doctor is going to tell me something other than “stop typing so much.” Ha ha ha, that’s a good one.[the netscape dorm By Jamie Zawinski. At
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html, accessed on 2010-06-28 ]
Besides visiting doctors and following other ergonomic practices
such as taking breaks, Jamie n
