World Unix Editor Contest Ends in Brawl (warning geek humor)

Enygma

World Unix Editor Contest Ends in Brawl

Five people were hospitalized and over a hundred suffered scrapes and bruises when the World Unix Editor Contest, held yesterday in Finland, ended in an all-out slugfest.

The contest, which included hundreds of physical and thousands of virtual spectators, was to award a US$10,000 prize to the authors of the best Unix text editor.

All went smoothly for the first ten minutes of the contest, during which time the pool of contestants was reduced to two: emacs and vi.

As the judges considered the two finalists, wordless tension mounted in the audience. The tension finally broke in an incident following an observation by judge unixhacker@cs.unl.edu that emacs includes better mouse support. Judge backslash@orb.freesoft.org quickly retorted, "But would a hard-core Unix user even want mouse support?" At this point, an unidentified member of the audience shouted, "You tell 'em! I would throw my mouse away if it would save me from using emacs!"

A shouting match ensued, drowning out a few protests of "don't feed the troll." Violence spontaneously erupted within minutes. Police attempted to pull the judges out of the melee, but they tore free of the police and jumped into the crowd shouting "LART!" along with various vi or emacs slogans.

Users of other editors attempted to form a "third force" to combat the other two. However, their shaky unity collapsed when someone (alledgedly picouser@bsdland.org) shouted, "You're all just jealous because your editor isn't as good as pico." Several aXe users shouted in unison the knee-jerk reply, "what's 'pico' is your brain size," and from that moment on the "third force" hackers merely fought amongst themselves.

A non-geek passer-by narrowly escaped with his life after observing aloud that, though he didn't know what words like "emacs" or "pico" meant, he thought he had heard his friend Joe talk about them.

After twenty minutes of brutal violence, police finally managed to disperse the crowd using tear gas.

In addition to bodily injuries, much personal property was damaged. In particular, numerous laptop computers were battered to the point of being unusable - some by accident, but many as a result of being wielded as weapons by their furious owners.

The prize money was originally to be distributed to the authors of the winning editor. (Because many thousands of people have contributed to both vi and emacs, each contributor to the winner would logically have received several cents.) However, because no final winner was announced, the money was instead used to pay the medical bills of those injured in the brawl.

One issue that remains unresolved is who will clean up the meeting room for next week's conference of Perl and Python programmers.