4 ms·

How does this fit in with the Unix philosophy?

saidajigumi 8y ago
It doesn't, because "the Unix philosophy", in the meaning implied by your question, is oversimplified nonsense. There is both utility and architectural value to be found in integrated user experiences. To throw out just a few small examples, such experiences done well may reduce context switching and/or build on the user's deep skills in the integrated environment (esp. w/ Emacs' and vim's text manipulation support). Likewise, there is immense utility in a scriptable, user-programmable working environment, especially for developer's tools. Also note that Emacs and vim often comply with the oft-cited first bullet point (there's more than one!) of "the Unix philosophy" by reusing powerful yet single-purpose external tools under the hood. Case in point: git(this thread!), ag/ack, and so forth. So please forget the idea that bullet-point-one of the Unix philosophy is a sacred tablet from some ridiculous Unixy religion. It's just an old, occasionally useful, architectural rule of thumb that applies in relatively narrow circumstances relative to the breadth of modern computing experiences and implementations.
- sakuronto 8y ago
  Haha, sorry, I know my question was begging for that response. But even if you (and many others) appreciate tighter integration, others would appreciate the flexibility of being able to pick and choose what they like from emacs without being overwhelmed by what is an incredibly foreign environment.
  - philippejara 8y ago
    You can use emacs to run elisp the exact same way you'd use a python script, emacs is pretty much an elisp shell. And there is no loss of flexibility, emacs doesn't reimplement everything from the ground up and most features are reliant on "shell programs". Dired for example is pretty much a sophisticated skin over an ls call if i'm not mistaken.
aerique 8y ago
It does and it doesn't. Emacs is a Lisp environment / runtime and is composed of many small functions. So in a way it is similar to the Unix philosphy, except it runs on Lisp.
Spivak 8y ago
It's like saying a shell doesn't follow the Unix philosophy because it runs other programs. Each package does one thing, presumably well, is interchangable, customizable, and interops with everything else.
sedachv 8y ago
Very good question. A lot of the time "Write programs that do one thing and do it well" really means "I don't understand the difference between a procedure and a program." It is much easier to write procedures than it is to write programs, and it is often easier to turn a procedure into a program than vice-versa (emacsclient does the former especially well). Emacs is much better at "Writ[ing] programs to work together" - Emacs extensions usually work with each other without any extra effort, and deep integration is easy to achieve. "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface" is the reason why Unix utilities do not integrate well. To provide an example, I use mu4e[1] as an email client and reader, which uses a separate process running mu to operate on a Maildir. The Maildir is synchronized to multiple MDAs by OfflineIMAP, a command line program, which I set up to retrieve the IMAP passwords from an encrypted file using auth-source.el by execing emacsclient. With auth-source, all the credentials I need to access remote machines are in one GPG encrypted file, and Emacs takes care of handling communications with GPG, gpg-agent, and pinentry. So Emacs provides both a better way to work with other standalone programs, and, via the emacsclient/server model, a better way for standalone programs to work with Elisp code. [1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ [2] http://www.offlineimap.org/ http://www.offlineimap.org/
stormking 8y ago
Don't remember where I read this quote, but it sums up the situation pretty perfectly: > Emacs is a Lisp refugee in Unixland. It doesn't follow the Unix philosophy, it follows the Lisp philosophy. But it integrates...
gumby 8y ago
Emacs (~1976/1978) roughy predates Unix and came from a very different tradition (and FWIW wasn't originally written in Lisp either)

It doesn't, because "the Unix philosophy", in the meaning implied by your question, is oversimplified nonsense. There is both utility and architectural value to be found in integrated user experiences. To throw out just a few small examples, such experiences done well may reduce context switching and/or build on the user's deep skills in the integrated environment (esp. w/ Emacs' and vim's text manipulation support). Likewise, there is immense utility in a scriptable, user-programmable working environment, especially for developer's tools. Also note that Emacs and vim often comply with the oft-cited first bullet point (there's more than one!) of "the Unix philosophy" by reusing powerful yet single-purpose external tools under the hood. Case in point: git(this thread!), ag/ack, and so forth. So please forget the idea that bullet-point-one of the Unix philosophy is a sacred tablet from some ridiculous Unixy religion. It's just an old, occasionally useful, architectural rule of thumb that applies in relatively narrow circumstances relative to the breadth of modern computing experiences and implementations.

sakuronto 8y ago
Haha, sorry, I know my question was begging for that response. But even if you (and many others) appreciate tighter integration, others would appreciate the flexibility of being able to pick and choose what they like from emacs without being overwhelmed by what is an incredibly foreign environment.
- philippejara 8y ago
  You can use emacs to run elisp the exact same way you'd use a python script, emacs is pretty much an elisp shell. And there is no loss of flexibility, emacs doesn't reimplement everything from the ground up and most features are reliant on "shell programs". Dired for example is pretty much a sophisticated skin over an ls call if i'm not mistaken.

aerique 8y ago

It does and it doesn't. Emacs is a Lisp environment / runtime and is composed of many small functions. So in a way it is similar to the Unix philosphy, except it runs on Lisp.

Spivak 8y ago

It's like saying a shell doesn't follow the Unix philosophy because it runs other programs. Each package does one thing, presumably well, is interchangable, customizable, and interops with everything else.

sedachv 8y ago

Very good question. A lot of the time "Write programs that do one thing and do it well" really means "I don't understand the difference between a procedure and a program." It is much easier to write procedures than it is to write programs, and it is often easier to turn a procedure into a program than vice-versa (emacsclient does the former especially well). Emacs is much better at "Writ[ing] programs to work together" - Emacs extensions usually work with each other without any extra effort, and deep integration is easy to achieve. "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface" is the reason why Unix utilities do not integrate well. To provide an example, I use mu4e[1] as an email client and reader, which uses a separate process running mu to operate on a Maildir. The Maildir is synchronized to multiple MDAs by OfflineIMAP, a command line program, which I set up to retrieve the IMAP passwords from an encrypted file using auth-source.el by execing emacsclient. With auth-source, all the credentials I need to access remote machines are in one GPG encrypted file, and Emacs takes care of handling communications with GPG, gpg-agent, and pinentry. So Emacs provides both a better way to work with other standalone programs, and, via the emacsclient/server model, a better way for standalone programs to work with Elisp code. [1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ [2] http://www.offlineimap.org/ http://www.offlineimap.org/

stormking 8y ago

Don't remember where I read this quote, but it sums up the situation pretty perfectly: > Emacs is a Lisp refugee in Unixland. It doesn't follow the Unix philosophy, it follows the Lisp philosophy. But it integrates...

gumby 8y ago

Emacs (~1976/1978) roughy predates Unix and came from a very different tradition (and FWIW wasn't originally written in Lisp either)