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I have to say, that seems like a strange requirement: I have never really considered Emacs (or Lisp) to be particularly Unix-like at all! I think the plan 9 peo
by zxzax 5y ago
I have to say, that seems like a strange requirement: I have never really considered Emacs (or Lisp) to be particularly Unix-like at all! I think the plan 9 people would probably tell you to ditch Emacs and use acme (Me personally, I say use whatever you want).
- nine_k 5y agoEmacs inside is very unixy, under a particular angle. Everything is a list, a ton of small composable functions doing one thing well, one common language that unifies all key interfaces, and the general lack of a predefined final construction, but rather a bucket of Lego blocks around a kernel which does the heavy lifting. Acme us interesting, but pretty different; its automation is apparently written in the shell language using normal OS commands. AFAICT the Plan 9 shell lacks structured data types comparable to Lisp's: it has lists, but not nested lists, so such constructs are a bit less robust. Also, AFAICT, Acme actively wants mouse operations; I hope reasonable keyboard equivalents exist. I'll explore more of it in my copious free time (sigh).
- zxzax 5y agoHaving a lot of small composable functions and a lot of singly linked lists describes most functional programming languages though. I think that's only one part of the traditional Unix design. Though to me it was always seemed like the inspiration goes the opposite way -- it seems like Unix was in some ways designed as a "Lisp-like," where the shell works as a somewhat restricted version of functional programming that only operates on one data type.