🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <13346@hydra.gatech.EDU> ken@dali.gatech.edu (Ken Seefried iii) writes:
>With all due respect, IMHO this is the onus of using Unix at all. Unix
>places on the user the responsabiltiy of becoming proficient.  Unix is
>terse, unforgiving, cryptic, and in the hands of a knowledgeable and
>dedicated user, stunningly powerful...Emacs follows the tradition.

Eh?  EMACS was designed before Unix.  Though, it was designed
from an even more baroque environment -- TOPS-{10,20} and TECO.
TECO, now *there's* an editor!  It was programmable in a language
that looked exactly like line noise!

>OSes (sic) like MS-DOS make it the responsabilty of the application to
>be easy to use.  Unix is and always has been an OS of the power user.
>This, IMHO, is not going to change.  

Eh?  MS-DOS easy to use?  Maybe the applications are but there's nothing
in MS-DOS which makes that true.  MS-DOS configuration files are a joke.
The fact that it's single tasking is constraining to the max and leads
to hacky ways to do multi-tasking which *DON'T* work (TSR's), etc.

I guess if someone can come away from MS-DOS and feel it's an easy to
use system then the same software wizardry of shielding users from
the complexity of the underlying system can also be done on Unix.

>Is this a virtue or a vice of Unix (Emacs)?  I don't know.  But
>after using CP/M, RT-11, VMS, VM/CMS, MacOS, MS-DOS, OS/2 and
>Unix, as well as 3-4 editors on each...I'll take almost any
>version of Unix (Emacs) any day.

I like the enabling aspects of Unix (EMACS).  Both are built from
small dumb (axiomatic) tools.  Just like mathematics is built from
a few simple axioms, whole Unix (EMACS) applications can/are built
from a few simple processes tied together with either shell script
or ELISP.

-- 
<- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <david@twg.com>
<- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <david@ms.uky.edu>
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