Trend mongering (Was Re: [Ilugc] which Linux distros are dying?)
- From: kapil@xxxxxxxxxxx (Kapil Hari Paranjape)
- Date: Fri Jul 4 09:03:45 2008
Hello,
On Thu, 03 Jul 2008, Sujith wrote:
Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote:
> What happened to the Unix philosphy of doing one thing and doing it
> really well?
>
> If the program is a web browser, it should be a web-browser and not
> try to be a film-viewer, mail-reader, editor, programming interface
> etc. etc.
>
I completely agree with the KISS principle, but there are a few cases
where thinking outside the box results in something that changes the way
software is written. Emacs for example. It might be a kitchen sink, but
when you get a complete desktop environment that fits within a few megabytes,
I am more than willing to accommodate it.
Emacs is an interesting example. Note that basically emacs is:
(a) an editor
(b) a lisp interpreter
The latter is the "main" function and the former is a consequence!
Everything else you do with Emacs is done by running lisp code.
So saying that emacs "tries to do everything" is not very different
from saying that that perl/python tries to do everything.
Another good example of how things evolve to down-size is "xulrunner"
which is the fundamental interpreter which runs the different
applications like Firefox, Thunderbird etc. The former is "merely" a
UI engine with networking capabilities.
Now that I have said all this, I confess that I mostly use "elvis"
and "w3m" in preference to "emacs" and "firefox/conkeror".
Regards,
Kapil.
--
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url :
http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/attachments/20080704/0b372dd7/attachment.bin
Other related posts:
