Each week, I teach an after school class at my local Middle School. Today, while getting ready to present, I switched over to the browser tab containing my presentation and waited for the kids to take their seats.

One girl raised her hand and asked about a browser tab that showed Emacs Meetup. Clearly she wouldn’t care about some old programming editor, but I quickly summarized so I could get to the lesson. She said she uses it to play snakes. I told her that she probably uses something else, as Emacs is just some old editor. She insisted.

She quickly fired up Terminal on the Mac, typed emacs, and promptly entered M-x snake... How...how...did you do...know that? While I wrote a version of the snake game on my Apple ][ computer when I was a kid, I didn’t know that any one had written one for Emacs. Huh. Schooled in my editor by a kid.

She also typed in telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl.

She’s now my favorite.