Jens D. Baumgartner wrote:
>
> On Tue, Dec 08, 1998 at 11:34:29AM -0800, Keith Beattie wrote:
>
> > Well, I disagree. Personally I dislike massively integrated
> > applications like Outlook and Explorer. They are too big, too slow
> > and too complicated (to use and maintain). And I'm convinced that my
> [...]
> > Create small programs that do a single task and do it well.
> > Support a common communication mechanism so that each of these
> > small programs can be used together to solve complex tasks.
>
> Mmmmmh, Emacs is big, and IMHO pretty complicated. I don't want to say
> that Emacs is a bad application - no, I really like it. But learning
> how to use it cannot be regarded "easy". ;-)
>
Yea, I knew Emacs was going to be brought up ("but they don't know I a
big Emacs fan", I thought... :)
Honestly, Emacs straddles the fence on that rule in my opinion. It is
both an example of a set well integrated applications (if you consider
each lisp function or package as a application running within Emacs)
and a behemoth of an application. I guess it "gets away" with being a
behemoth in my mind because it is so well integrated and stable. It
could actually serve as an example of how complex tasks can be solved
via integrated components. One might make the same argument for
Excell and VB, but that doesn't appear as well organized and/or
componentized as Emacs, though I not as familiar with Excell.
Partially related thought: Wouldn't it be funny if HURD booted up to
an Emacs "*scratch*" buffer? (Funny to some... :)
I'm getting rather off topic for this thread, but I still think the
future of software engineering is in building components with
applications being the integrations of these components. Exactly
which form that will take, I'm not sure. At least I hope this is the
case, perhaps I'm just dreaming... (O-O, Corba, Tcl/Tk, etc.)
To answer the original poster's question, though, I think that the
reason why people want MS apps on Linux is because once somebody is on
a new OS, when it comes down to getting their work done, they
want/need to run the apps they are familiar with - which is why I'm
happy NTemacs exists. I think though that a Windows emulator might be
the best path for those folks, rather than learning a new app native
to Linux.
I'm done now...
ksb
