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. --
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