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Off topic, and forgive my naivety & ignorance, but I really do not understand the highly specific nature of this Principle / Law, as it is on wiki: "Every prog

Off topic, and forgive my naivety & ignorance, but I really do not understand the highly specific nature of this Principle / Law, as it is on wiki: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." ... was Mail just the example at the time? and this is basically just the a generic reference to feature/scope creep?... I just don't get the highly specific inclusion of "Reading mail" as something that all programs expand towards.

khedoros1 9y ago
Synecdoche. Mail stands in for the general class of popular features.
jwilk 9y ago
It's a joke about feature creep. Of course, most programs don't and shouldn't read mail. The choice of this particular feature was not accidental. JWZ was a developer of Netscape Mail: https://www.jwz.org/hacks/ https://www.jwz.org/hacks/
- ryan-c 9y ago
  Copy/paste the link, do not click.
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    Why?
    - ReverseCold 9y ago
      Try it and you'll see why. It's not bad.
    - stordoff 9y ago
      It detects HN as a referer, and redirects to an unrelated image.
      - kstrauser 9y ago
        Oh weird. I didn't get the redirect the first time I had clicked the link.
grkvlt 9y ago
These days it would be browsing and displaying web pages, I suspect: "Every program attempts to expand until it can browse the web. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
- rickycook 9y ago
  “every program attempts to expand until it includes a full copy of chromium...”
  - beiller 9y ago
    Haha. "Every program attempts to expand until it can compile and run a copy of itself"
dguaraglia 9y ago
It's a bit of both. I think the joke was mostly driven by Emacs which - due to how incredibly flexible the Elisp interpret is - started gaining plugins to do the most absurd things. There is, for example, a full "web browser" mode, a full-blown email client, even an implementation of the Snake game.
- na85 9y ago
  You can have my nyan cat modeline when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    Haha,I'll confess that as a Vim user I was a bit jealous when I saw that. The Vimscript implementations are subpar.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    You're welcome! :).
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  The funny thing is, Emacs does a lot of those things better than the dedicated applications. It seems that anything that involves text or textual representations can be done in Emacs better, and every feature you import composes with each other nicely and consistently, leading to more speed and more power.
caf 9y ago
Mail was particularly prone to this because, in the days when mail was usually locally delivered to the UNIX system you'd also use for running interactive programs, adding the ability for a program to read mail was just a fairly simple matter of parsing the user's mbox file. Most terminal mode IRC clients will at least tell you when you have new (locally-delivered) mail, for example.

khedoros1 9y ago

Synecdoche. Mail stands in for the general class of popular features.

jwilk 9y ago

It's a joke about feature creep. Of course, most programs don't and shouldn't read mail. The choice of this particular feature was not accidental. JWZ was a developer of Netscape Mail: https://www.jwz.org/hacks/ https://www.jwz.org/hacks/

ryan-c 9y ago
Copy/paste the link, do not click.
- kstrauser 9y ago
  Why?
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    Try it and you'll see why. It's not bad.
  - stordoff 9y ago
    It detects HN as a referer, and redirects to an unrelated image.
    - kstrauser 9y ago
      Oh weird. I didn't get the redirect the first time I had clicked the link.

grkvlt 9y ago

These days it would be browsing and displaying web pages, I suspect: "Every program attempts to expand until it can browse the web. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

rickycook 9y ago
“every program attempts to expand until it includes a full copy of chromium...”
- beiller 9y ago
  Haha. "Every program attempts to expand until it can compile and run a copy of itself"

dguaraglia 9y ago

It's a bit of both. I think the joke was mostly driven by Emacs which - due to how incredibly flexible the Elisp interpret is - started gaining plugins to do the most absurd things. There is, for example, a full "web browser" mode, a full-blown email client, even an implementation of the Snake game.

na85 9y ago
You can have my nyan cat modeline when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  Haha,I'll confess that as a Vim user I was a bit jealous when I saw that. The Vimscript implementations are subpar.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  You're welcome! :).
TeMPOraL 9y ago
The funny thing is, Emacs does a lot of those things better than the dedicated applications. It seems that anything that involves text or textual representations can be done in Emacs better, and every feature you import composes with each other nicely and consistently, leading to more speed and more power.

caf 9y ago

Mail was particularly prone to this because, in the days when mail was usually locally delivered to the UNIX system you'd also use for running interactive programs, adding the ability for a program to read mail was just a fairly simple matter of parsing the user's mbox file. Most terminal mode IRC clients will at least tell you when you have new (locally-delivered) mail, for example.