Paolo Amoroso
I chewed on the tasty food for thought of the blog series by Ramin Honary @ramin_hal9001 on how Emacs fulfills the Unix philosophy. If a Lisp system is extensible, customizable, and self-documenting by design I'd say it's an application platform, or pretty close.
https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-fulfills-the-unix-philosophy.html
Ramin, @sacha Sacha Chua, and @screwtape will elaborate on this in an upcoming episode of the Lispy Gopher show. Full context:
Alfred M. Szmidt
@Zenie How was Emacs "bloated" in the 1980s? And how is it not an "editor"?
Zenie
@bshankar @ramin_hal9001 @amoroso @screwtape @sacha
I think #Emacs follows the Unix philosophy
Just fine. It's a system of composable parts,
We keep adding more parts that we can use for our compositions, just like Unix. And many of the things we add are actually from the Unix environment.
We just plug in and use them. There's nothing more Unixy than that.
It's a programming language and an environment and runtime for that language. It just happens to have nice parts to make an editor from.
Really, it's just turtles all the way down.
Emacs was bloated in 1980 when we mistakenly compared it to vi, a tiny editor, thinking that emacs was an editor.
Bhavani Shankar
Alfred M. Szmidt
@amoroso Maybe it is that UNIX is a Lisp? 🤔 Emacs existed before Unix, Lisp existed before Unix.
Alfred M. Szmidt
@Zenie I suggest you look into the history of Emacs, on what kind of systems it ran on in the 1970s, cause most of what you said is total nonsense and bullshit.
Zenie
@amszmidt @bshankar @ramin_hal9001 @amoroso @screwtape @sacha
Emacs was always an editor. But not just an editor.
Vi is just an editor and not nearly as bloated as vim.
Vi is lightweight, based on ed. By comparison emacs was huge. But emacs was a lisp programming environment with an editor that happened to be written in itself.
Computers were much smaller then. A swap drive was actually necessary and changing from one application to another often caused swapping.
Vi was fast and small. But it is still just an editor.
It's a misleading comparison, much like VScode vs emacs now. Emacs is svelte these days.
Alfred M. Szmidt
@ramin_hal9001 It was idle slander, GNU Emacs specifically was designed for low end machines and systems. A lot of care was taken to not swap, or eat a lot of memory.
@bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @Zenie@piaille.fr @sacha
Ramin Honary
We always made fun of emacs because you could often hear the disks swapping.
@Zenie I guess “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swaping” was not just an idle slander, so it really did have to do lots of swapping.
And yes, if you really believe in the “each tool does one thing and does it well” ethos, then why not have all of your tools written in Lisp and work together nicely in a consistent environment?
Thanks for telling us your story!
Zenie
@amszmidt @bshankar @ramin_hal9001 @amoroso @screwtape @sacha
Just to be clear. I was a Unix systems developer
From around 1980.
I was there.
We always made fun of emacs because you could often hear the disks swapping.
Alfred M. Szmidt
@ramin_hal9001 The whole "joke" that you could hear the disk is bull, the machines where in server rooms. As a user you would never hear it, let alone be alone using it (this is 1980, not 1990 where you might have had a SPARCStation 10 or something on your desk -- and that crap would constantly swap anyway)
Alfred M. Szmidt
@ramin_hal9001 Which didn't run Emacs (let alone GNU Emacs!), and is from 1970ish.
Ramin Honary
@amszmidt well, I believe the story. Zenie said, she was working on a Xerox Alto System 9, which was a machine that would be placed in the office, not a data center, and could connect several Wyse terminals to it, each one at an individual’s desk.
Alfred M. Szmidt
@mapcar GNU Emacs first (public) release was in 1985, it had no graphical support. Nor did it run on PERQ. GNU Emacs 15 was the first to support Sun. The main system GNU Emacs supported was VAX with BSD 4.2 for quite a bit of its history ... you don't want a VAX 8550 under your desk.
Christian Lynbech
@amszmidt @ramin_hal9001 @bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha I started at university in 1986 and we certainly had graphical workstations on desks (in the beginning mostly Sun and PERQ, later also SGI and HP).
I am confident that Emacs was in widespread use in the offices, though I do not remember anybody complaining about disk noise (swapping or otherwise).
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