On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Christopher Howard wrote:
> I see the flamewar spirit is strong in this one.
:-) It's been awhile, need to shake the rust off...
> Whoa there, buddy! Comparing Emacs to Windows and systemd, really? What
> about Nazi's or Communists too?
:-) It's a philosophical thing, which is definitely subject to individual
tastes. End sum: like a lot of Windows software, and now nasty Linux
infections like systemd, I don't like big, complicated blocks with a ton of
points of failure. I like small, concise, well honed blocks. To be fair,
some of the "advancements" in vim are starting to push the boundaries, but
luckily a lot of that can be compiled out.
> Emacs isn't just an editor. Emacs is an extensible, modular programming
> environment tailored for text editing. Complaining that Emacs tries to
> do to much is like saying that Python tries to do too much. They are
> both designed ultimately to do whatever the heck you want, within the
> limitations of certain paradigms.
>
> You can restrict Emacs to core functionality, by not loading the modules
> you don't want. Of course, most people want the very useful
> functionality, so the modules are loaded by default. Of course, you
> can't quite strip Emacs down to bare text editor functionality (i.e.,
> just the key bindings, and save/load functionality, and perhaps macros,
> if you wish to define it that way) because then it ceases to be Emacs
> (see above paragraph). But it is very easy to program such an editor
> (e.g., the one I started this thread about), and there is no reasons
> such an editor can't be as ubiquitous on systems as Vi. Except that most
> of the people creating these distros are rabid Vi fans, and they pick
> what they want.
I think you just corroborated the "Emacs is an OS" bit. ;-)
> Oh, boo hoo. One day in the distant future I might work for some idiot
> boss who is to stubborn to let me install Emacs. In that case, I'd
> install it myself from source in my local directory. (Yes, I know how to
> do this.) Or I'd work from my laptop, since Emacs has tramp support, and
> I know about wonderful things like sshfs.
This stubborn boss has no problem with emacs on the workstation, but you're
right, I would never allow it on the server. And I would definitely take
issue with any employee installing it in their home directory as well. No
software not necessary to production workloads go into the production
environment, period.
If you can't use the tools of the trade effectively, you're in the wrong
trade. I can see emacs value for a developer, but that's an awfully big
crutch for a sysadmin.
> BTW, I actually worked in a large scale enterprise server environment -
> a supercomputing center. All the software they have is ancient, but they
> still have Gnu Emacs - on every system.
Having seen several of them I would offer up the idea that you've seen the
exception, not the rule.
> I'm not sure about the "heterogenous" issue. I thought we had solved
> that with POSIX and all the other wonderful standards. At least enough
> to get a no-X Emacs installed. But evidently there is some decrepit
> environment out there somewhere that you have been forced to work in.
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusions from my statements. One thing
I've always stressed with my guys is portable knowledge. Emacs, for all
that it's portable in theory, isn't omni-present in all environments, even
if that's just by choice. But you'll *never* find a UNIX installation that
lacks vi. So, whether it's your systems, a customer's systems, or just
random friends', you shouldn't have to install a very large editor just to
get things done quickly.
The reality is this: if you're not actively using any tool on a
regular basis, you're not maintaining or improving proficiency. I try to
focus on the tools I know I can leverage in the most environments.
> Well, what I actually do is load up my demi-OS, and then use that
> instance to open and edit every file I work on throughout the whole day.
Ah, but most of your work is local, and development oriented, from what I've
gathered, right? That makes your usage scenario the corner case, not the
norm.
--Arthur Corliss
Live Free or Die
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Received on Thu Apr 18 09:27:32 2013
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