🚀 go-pugleaf

  Somebody who is starving would assume that "free lunch" means lunch
without having to pay. If you want to convey the kind of a meaning you
are hinting at, use "freedom to eat" or "liberty of having
lunch whenever/wherever/whatever/whichever one wishes to". You can't
blame some body if she/he choses to take the more prevalent and direct
meaning of the "free lunch". This is precisly the point I am trying to
make - GNU is built on a shaky foundation - Unix. Unix's defaults are
against the grain of intuition and common sense, just like the
name "Free Software Foundation" stands for "Liberty to program freely,
at one's own choosing" where as a naive person like me would take it
to be "Well, I don't have to pay for the software. It is like free
lunch - I am getting free software". By just saying that GNU is not
Unix is not enough. Break away from the inconsistency, from names
like AWK (does this tell me anything about the functionality of AWK?),
from csh inconsistencies like -a -o of test and && and ||, from
stupidity of having to escape a newline in the define preprocessor
stmt of c language (I cannot still figure out how somebody having gone
through a course in compilers can be so naive as to force the user
to escape the newline to continue on to the next line - don't you
agree that it is very easy to parse for the end of the define with a
"enddefine" keyword?), from the completely archaic syntax of make (tabs
in front of a system command - give me a break), from the total chaos
of regular expression syntax between the various utilities (grep,
egrep, fgrep, GNU grep, sed, vi, awk, emacs (online and elisp are
still different - how many times people have written a very
complicated reg exp and are sure that it is doing what they want it to
do? I for one can never be sure and have to check my work again - may
be I am plain dumb), the impossibility of programming vi in other than
line noise like macros (which do not take parameters), the idiocy of
having to parse the command line in your c program for scanning
through -f -i etc. and the resulting inconsistency of each
program/utility/filter having it's own conventions about what can be
given together, where should be a space, where should not be a space,
can all the options be given after the dash, or they msut be given
individually, seperated by dashes in front of each option or not,.....
the list goes on. If GNU Emacs (or any other GNU product) has to rely
on this inconsistent set of utilities/programs/filters, it will pay
the price for the inconsistency in the form of user non-acceptance and
will utlimately fail. The key is to take a dive and completely
break away from unix and set a new trend. What the trend is should
come from somebody who has interest, imagination and is creative. May
be it is RMS, but there are others like Mike Cowlishaw who has
developed Rexx and may be the guy who developed Pick OS. It could be
me.

Anil Joshi
joshi@cs.uiuc.edu





-- 
"Tiviri isumuna tailambu teeyavacchu, tavili mrigatrishnalo neeru traagavacchu
tirigi kundeti kommu saadhipma vacchu, cheri muurkhula manasu ranjimpa raadhu"
- An ancient "Telugu" "Padyam"