My father was an early Linux and FSF fan and, with the first kernel compiled in our house as early as 1995/1996. I didn't like the idea back then as all PC games my geeky friends played back then didn't really run on non-DOS or Windows 95 machines.

Eventually, I did learn my way around Linux, bash and even bits of C. Admittedly, pointers were beyond a 10 year old brain of mine. My dad tried to teach me Emacs but it was just too much so I just used mcedit and the like whenever I needed an editor.

Some time later, around 2004/2005, when I was studying electrical engineering, a professor mentioned that they have a system needing an upgrade from a UI built in Turbo Pascal as well as a backend written in Fortran.

I gave my father a call and he said: this should be done with Qt for portability, the code has to use version control, and might be ok to use Emacs this time around. I remember spending my summer on learning all the tools: C++ was a beast, then Qt, then Emacs, then Subversion. Real tools of real programmers!

And then, finally, I wrote the prototype UI, and the professor loved it. This guy ended up becoming the Head of the EE Department of the uni, and I wrote A LOT of code for him. I heard that students still use a derivative of the system.

Either way, Emacs has stayed with me. In EE of the day a thesis usually meant a lot of computation written in Matlab. But! The computation would then need to be accompanied with proofs and symbols typed in Word or something like it to be printed later. In fact, the bulk of work was making sure Matlab files were in sync with whatever was written in the doc.

I hated to use non-typist friendly UIs so decided that I would use Octave for computation and Latex for documents to avoid using clunky word processors.

Still had to type things twice: in Octave first, Latex next. At some point after reading an old library book on Lisp (late 80s, Finnish, 2 authors, describing something a lot like Common Lisp) I realised that I can make Emacs generate Latex from octave files!

So I ended up writing a very, very naive parser of Octave formulas and some kind of a meta markup language in Octave code comments. My thesis would then be generated from my octave files end to end. This took most of the last uni year, and there were some problems with getting the real work done on time…

But I endlessly enjoyed the endevour. Of course, I went on to become a programmer. And now, 15+ years later, as a senior engineering manager, I still use Emacs. There are a couple of commits of mine in the core and also packages I use daily.

It's probably wrong to fall in love one's tool. But Emacs and Emacs Lisp have always been such a big part of my life that there's no way I can use anything else nowadays.

So looking forward to the next 15 years of Emacs!