Notices by Ramin Honary (ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org)

Listen at: https://archives.anonradio.net/202504020000_screwtape.mp3

This week we will talk about the Unix Philosophy and how it compares and contrasts with whatever one might call the “Emacs Philosophy.”

The impetus for the discussion is a series of blog posts by @ramin_hal9001 called “Emacs fulfills the UNIX Philosophy”:

• The original introductory blog post
• The show notes

…as well as a fascinating discussion that took place over this past week on ActivityPub on the topic of the Unix philosophy and history of Lisp on Unix in which some very knowledgeable people have contributed anecdotes and facts.

#technology #programming #SoftwareEngineering #RetroComputing #lisp #r7rs #SchemeLang #UnixPhilosophy

#senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems

@screwtape I wish there was a port of CLIM for Scheme that I could use for my Emacs clone, but I don’t know if any of the Scheme implementations of the Meta Object Protocol (MOP) are comprehensive enough to support CLIM. The same is true of the Emacs MOP, which is some combination of cl-lib and EIEIO, I don’t think you could implement CLIM with just that.

Also, every Scheme MOP is platform-specific. GOOPS is only for Guile, COOPS is only for Chicken, SOS Is only for MIT Scheme.

The Racket GUI library is quite good, but it relies too heavily on Racket’s macro system to make it very portable to other Schemes.

For myself, I was thinking of rewriting a lightweight JavaScript React-like framework called Van.js to Scheme and use it to implement a higher-level interface around an existing GUI framework like Gtk. The nice thing about Gtk is that the FFI bindings are automated throught GObject Introspection, and it has been ported to all major operating systems.

But I think a better long-term solution for my Emacs clone would just be to implement the full MOP and then CLIM in Scheme.

@slgr

I’m planning to put scheme as an optional runtime in ecl

@jackdaniel implementing Scheme in Common Lisp sounds like a really cool idea! Will it comply with the R7RS standard? If it does, then I can easily port my Emacs clone to ECL Scheme.

One goal of my project is portability across multiple Scheme implementations. The problem with the GUI is that I need a high-level interface written in Scheme that makes calls to lower-level platform-specific GUI library calls. If I had a MOP implementation that was written in fully-standards-compilant R7RS Scheme and CLIM implemented on top of that, it would work on other platforms that did not provide a MOP or CLIM. When porting it to ECL, I could just leave-out these high-level libraries and allow programmers to use the underlying ECL CLIM libraries directly.

@screwtape @slgr

early Lisp on UNIX: Franz Lisp (80s).

@symbolics I suspected that Franz may have been ported to Unix eraly-on, but I had a hard time finding evidence of it, so thanks for confirming that!

Most people consider Stallman’s Emacs to be the origin of Emacs back in 1976-ish based on the TECO editor, even though the Emacs of that era would probably be unrecognizable to us nowadays. Greenberg wrote Emacs in MacLisp in 1978, and so I think that was the first Emacs Lisp, but this was running on ITS, not Unix.

I understand that Emacs already had quite a following by the time Gosling Emacs was officially released in 1984, and Stallman’s GNU Emacs v15 released in 1985 saw wide-spread distribution as a result.

• https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory

So I guess Franz was indeed probably the first Lisp to run on Unix.

@AmenZwa @masso @screwtape @sacha

@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.

@bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha

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!

@amszmidt @bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha

Besides, I don’t want my Emacs to do “one thing” (even if it did that one thing very, very well), because I don’t want to do just one thing

@sacha yes indeed. My article is critical of the UNIX Philosophy, not supportive of it. I prefer not tools that “do one thing and do it well,” I prefer tools that are simple, orthogonal, and composable, i.e. “functions” in a functional programming environment. So any environment (such as Emacs) that allows me to compose these tools together easily is a computing environment I would prefer to use.

@bshankar @amoroso @screwtape

@firebreathingduck @sacha it is funny to me that we have Emacs “distros” like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs that give you Vim bindings, but not really anything yet for VS Code bindings. That would lower the barrier to entry.

@hellomiakoda same with me.

Actually, the whole “you get more conservative as you get older” truism was based on the fact that throughout the lifetime of the boomers, The West and especially the US was becoming so wealthy from the spoils of World War 2 that basically anyone of a certain age was incredibly likely to become more wealthy as they got older, and the more wealthy you get, the more greedy and detatched from reality you get, and thus the more conservative you get. But Gen-X and later are experiencing poverty at an ever-increasing rate, and so fewer and fewer people are becoming conservative as they get older.

@sacha @screwtape I had a little free time today, so I wrote an outline to keep our discussion on track during the recording of the podcast next week. It is on Codeberg, so send a pull request if you want to change anything.

https://codeberg.org/ramin_hal9001/lisp-gopher-climate_chat-about-emacs/src/branch/main/show-outline.org

@screwtape @sacha @masso as far as I can tell, Emacs was one of the first Lisp implementations for Unix systems, and it was free to use, so it would have probably become pretty popular for that reason. Both the GNU project and Emacs had got started before Common Lisp was even standardized. In those days, Lisp was being implemented mostly on mainframes and minicomputers, on the Xerox Alto, and on bespoke hardware like in the case of Symbolics. But this was in parallel to development of Unix, and so Unix maybe wasn’t as widely used or popular enough at the time for anyone to bother porting Lisp to it until the 1980s after GNU started cloning Unix.

So there may well have been other Lisp implementations on Unix or it’s clones, but I don’t know enough about pre-1980s Lisp. I don’t even know what computer Steele and Sussman used to implement the first Scheme.

@hellomiakoda I’m the same. I am completely self-taught with keyboarding. Fortunately, keyboarding was an elective class at my school so I never had anyone teaching me the “right way.”

I could probably improve my technique by sticking more to the home row and being more conscious of the nubs on the “F” and “J” keys (on QWERTY) and increase my normal rate from roughly 100 wpm to maybe 110 or 120 wpm, but typing speed is not the thing that I need to optimize if I want to get more things done in a day.

Emacspeak is not a desktop environment.

@kc that is a very debatable claim.

(You are probably not interested in debate, but on the off-chance that you are, please read this first.)

@ArneBab @PepperTheVixen

And I guess regions aren’t supported at all in that editor?

@amszmidt it has “selections,” but not really regions, so there is no C-x C-x (swap point and mark) command, which is unfortunate because I use that one all the time. That said, Control-K does the same thing as Emacs C-k.

And there is no kill-ring either so C-y M-y does not work, it is just the ordinary Mac OS copy-paste buffer. That one would have been helpful.

Oh, and You can’t use “Option” as Emacs “Meta” unless it is combined with Control, it seems. So any command that uses Mata as the only modifier will not work. Mac OS uses “Option” for selecting another layer of the keyboard, defaulting to Greek letters. It has been this way since even the 1980s.

You have to pay me pretty well to use Mac OS or Windows… and that is what my new employer is doing, so I have started using Mac OS as a daily driver again for the first time in over 15 years. For the most part I have been quite disappointed with how things have changed in that time.

But, I just discovered one little detail in the Mac OS “Text Edit“ application that made my day: it has a few of the Emacs key bindings built-in. You can do Control-N,P,F,B to move the cursor around, Option-Control-F,B to jump around words, and Control-Y to paste text. (Unfortunately, Control-W does not copy text.) I am sure there are a few others, I haven’t bothered to check yet.

Well done, Mac OS engineers.

#tech #software #Apple #TextEditor #Emacs

@hellomiakoda I see.

Yeah, I was considering getting the FLX1 because it has such good specs at a good price point. But I decided I didn’t really need high specs so much as I needed repairability, so I went with the FairPhone instead.

Apparently, FLX1 is Droidian, which as I understand it, is a Debian (Mobian) userland and package manager running on top of an Android kernel with Android proprietary drivers and (like you said) the Android runtime containers for apps from FDroid and the Google Play Store.

I wish I could try a few distros, but I am only going to have one Fairphone and I don’t want to accidentally brick it or otherwise fuck around with it too much since it is going to be my daily driver and I can’t go without a phone, so I don’t want to switch the OS more than once.

Linux mobile is a bit of a learning curve.

@hellomiakoda I just bought FairPhone5 (still shipping), and it has the default Android build, but it is supposed to be carrier unlocked, so I was thinking of installing something like Mobian, /e/OS, Postmarket, or Lineage. I don’t know if Linux or de-Googled Android would be better, but I am guessing it would probably be a lot easier to find drivers for de-Googled Android.

What are some of the difficulties you have had with Linux mobile, and do you have a favorite distro?

The box which has it isn’t exactly what I’d call fast, so still chugging away, but it’s a third of the way through and so far it is compressing to 5% of it’s unpack size.

@Infoseepage thank you for doing the compression!

@shaknais @luckytran @gamambel

No joke. I just ran a test compressing the 100+ GB and it is compressing down to maybe 1/10th the size using 7z on the LZMA2 Ultra setting.

@Infoseepage I believe it. CSV data is usually incredibly repetitive and can often compress down quite a lot.

Maybe we should update the Internet Archive page for this dataset with the compressed files?

@shaknais @luckytran @gamambel

Does anyone have a pkzipped or tar-[bgx]zipped torrent of the same data? The torrent file on Archive.org seems to be all uncompressed CSV data which makes it much heavier to share around than it should be.

@Infoseepage @shaknais @gamambel @luckytran