I agree with the overal sentiment, yet the examples could be better.
> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
Text is very complicated. Does your 42-year-old Emacs support Unicode? And not just accents, but whole different scripts?
I'm not sure if the author meant current versions of emacs (with their 42 year lineage) or not. But if that's the case, then I think emacs was one of the very first to support Unicode and whole different scripts. If my memory does not fail me, emacs had extensive wide character support long before Unicode. With an extraordinarily broad treasure trope of different input methods on top.
emacs has also always been (in)famous for its text update render algorithms, that probably still work well over the old slow terminal lines it was originally used for.
> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
Text is very complicated. Does your 42-year-old Emacs support Unicode? And not just accents, but whole different scripts?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21105625 for some discussion and a good link about the complexities of rendering text.