🚀 go-pugleaf

>A sufficent explanation of the difference in system philosophy
>between the UNIX operating system and the Emacs virtual operating
>system is, I think, inherent in the difference in system history:
>
>	UNIX grew up on a very small machine, the PDP-11
>
>	EMACS grew up on a very large machine, the PDP-10

Argh. This is taking a side effect of its design philosophy and
stating it AS the design philosophy. While it's certainly true
that a large part of UNIX's power and appeal lies in its ability
to string a lot of well isolated tools together, it's a dangerous
trap to assume that ALL tools should be similarly isolated to
correctly follow the Unix "philosophy" (small, elegant and ignorant).

While a good many tasks can be performed using this approach, many
actually require moving along opposite lines. Seamless integration,
rather that defined isolation, seems to be one of the new targets
that software developers are trying to hit. The fact that people
are putting down large chunks of change for packages like "Alis",
despite their, er, rather poor design and implementation is a case-in-point.

Calling EMACS an "Editor" is like calling Unix a "dispatcher". It's
an environment, and an exceptionally powerful and extensible one at
that. I can read my news, transfering any interesting articles to an
MH folder, or stripping the headers off of a shell archive in-situ and
unpacking it on the fly. If I decided to then compile it I could do
so, tracking and fixing any errors along the way. If it all proved to
be too much, I could grab the error messages and stuff them into an
informative mail message to the author, all without leaving emacs!

I won't even go into the value of having emacs while developing Lisp/C
code.

Emacs is an adjunct to Unix, not just another subordinate tool.

					Jordan Hubbard
--
			PCS Computer Systeme GmbH, Munich, West Germany
	UUCP:		pyramid!pcsbst!jkh jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com
	EUNET:		unido!pcsbst!jkh
	ARPA:		jkh@violet.berkeley.edu or hubbard@decwrl.dec.com