@screwtape

At the start of your radio show this week, you mentioned the terms haiku/senryū/tanka. I had some comments on that.

I'm not some sort of expert on what these are. I just use the form and figure, in the way that an online poetry class, How Writers Write Poetry, that I took at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program offered, that each poem creates the terms on which it is to be judged. So it really doesn't matter a lot to me whether I'm precisely correct, so much as that I have my own sense of the form I want to say the things i want.

But I also try to at least be vaguely correct. So what follows here is my understanding but is not offered as an authoritative piece. People should feel free to offer corrections or critiques if they like, as long as they realize that I'm not in the first place saying I'm the best place to read about these things. There are some very good online descriptions that differ in subtle ways and I don't even care that they disagree because to me, that's not the point of poetry.

A haiku is a 5-7-5 syllable poem based on nature and seasons. There are a few other subtleties, and some controversy as to whether all project properly into English.

In particular, there is a thing called a kireji that has grammatical form in Japanese or Kanji, I presume representing it (and incidentally shared by Chinese). A kireji is described in Wikipedia as "is a word or phrase that creates a pause or break in the flow of a haiku". I'm unclear about whether this is a fixed set. But I know someone who thinks of it as a semicolon, connecting two full sentences in tight form. I myself just assume that, sans kireji, I should make line (the second 5 in 5-7-5) be a change of direction of some kind, including an irony, a contradiction, a commentary, or some other surprise element. The haiku form is a very short space in which to write anything, so it's important to me not to waste words on that, and merely to nice that line 3 is special

A senryu is the same structure but less about nature and more about things like the 'human foibles' you mentioned.

I have a special problem with knowing whether some of my poetry counts as proper haiku because supposedly it's about the seasons and should include a kigo (season word, which might include things like cherry blossoms associated with the season, not necessarily precisely the season). But climate change disturbs the structure and so the set of elements belonging in the set, not to mention it also "goes meta" and speaks of the mechanical process of how, why, or whether seasons are shifted, not just in-frame views of a season. ChatGPT was supportive of my staking a claim in this space, as it says others have done, but I'm never quit sure when to trust its judgment. I push forward mostly because I'm strong-willed. But I usually label with both terms to acknowledge potential controversy or just difficulty with lookup.

A tanka is a 5-7-5-7-7 poem of similar kind, and I ASSUME it traditionally is a haiku in content but mostly I write senryu so I only presume/force it to be more a modifier than a noun in order to have both tanka-haiku and tanka-senryu, though if you look it up they just say it's a noun.

Tankas are usually two tightly related yet grammatically independent thoughts, even I've read some places, written by different people for the 5-7-5 and the 7-7, where the 7-7 builds a different thought around the core thought of the 5-7-5 part, which I understand to be free-standing. One place I read suggested the 7-7 part was at least sometimes a response that came back from someone writing a haiku as correspondence.

I'm not going to cite extra references here because I'd have to look them up. Better you should do it not only because I am admittedly lazy, but also because in researching it (if you care, and you might legitimately not), you'll probably find some lovely essays by others on how to think about these art forms.

@screwtape

This will be very rambly and informal and free-format and approximate, but someone might like it...

TECO has been around a long time. It was certainly around when I arrived on the MIT scene 1977-ish. But probably a long time before.

You asked what people used as a screen editor and I have to laugh. TECO was not really a screen editor, but was the implementation substrate for original Emacs. I'll tell the story I know.

TECO had commands that were single character (mostly, though some composed) and you did a set of commands and then could ask to see what you did. Usually, because it also worked on a paper terminal (which recorded everything you typed onto reams of paper), you saw maybe one line of context and then made some change. Some people did really long lives with entire defuns on one line. But it kind of didn't matter. c was the command to move foward. d to delete a character. 3c-4d would go forward 3 characters and delete 4 characters backward. You ended your command with Esc Esc (which echoed as $$) so 3c-4d$$ would show you the edited line and then you'd do more. A single Esc was a command separator or terminator, but two caused it to go.

You could put "macros" (really just strings of commands) in a thing called a q-register (really just a variable, except primitive Teco had no variables). The q-registers were so-called because they were named q0, q1, etc. and also qA, qB, ... qZ. You could put something in them with u. 5uA puts 5 into qA. Some commands were modifiable with @ or : (like in format strings in CL). So while ifoo$ would insert foo into the buffer at the current point, :i05c-4d$ would not insert anything in the buffer but would instead insert '5c-4d' into q0. So once you have strings in q registers you could execute them with m, as in m0 which would execute my sample string from above.

At some point, they changed it on glass (non-paper) screens to show you the buffer as edited, but still it was not doing the WYSIWYG thing. You saw part of a buffer with /\ as a cursor. So /\foo if the cursor was before foo. And Steele suggested that if there was a q-register assigned to each key, you could have it run that macro on hitting that key, which was the origin of emacs ^R (control-R) mode, ^R being the command that would get you into it. R for "real-time" mode. Stallman implemented it. I don't know who thought up the naming, probably Stallman.

The key bindings were on specially named new q-registers that had dots in their names. I think q^RA, q^RB, etc. where ^R was a control-R character. For control-A, q^R.A, for meta-A, q^R..A, etc. and for c-m-A q^R...A, so that allowed binding all the keys.

And at that point you had a realtime mode that was emacs-like. People could have init files that loaded up any of the q-registers with their own bindings, and there were library formats created so people could pre-load complicated definitions.

There was a lot of competition for whose library bindings would win out. Emacs was not the only early offering. Whole other packagings were available from various people. But eventually there was a mostly-consensus on a lot of it, and the rest became libraries on that.

TECO, especially the MIT variant, looks a bit like line noise since nearly every character was a command. But fortunately in libraries the style was to include code on the first half of the line and use the last half of the line as a comment explaining it. Here's a pointer to a library I wrote in TECO that tried to emulate some of the Lisp Machine's mail reader Zmail. If you want to see how the language worked by just kind of letting it roll past you.

https://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/01/emacs/zbabyl.emacs.html