#emacs #unix Miscellaneous notes on reading @ramin_hal9001 https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-fulfills-the-unix-philosophy.html
https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-unix-01_emacs-is-an-app-platform.html
https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-unix-02_what-is-the-unix-philosophy.html
https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-unix-03_unix-is-lesser-fp.html
https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-unix-04_lisp-does-fp-better-than-bash.html
https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-unix-05_unix-and-lisp-history.html
https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-unix-06_rebutting-critiques.html
For starters, excellent early history showing that unix and lisp are not direct relatives.
One small note that occurs to me is that in Mashey and Kernighan '84, they point at unix's shell's success at stopping people more C. 1/?? (but two for my purposes here)
@ramin_hal9001
In contrast, in the revised article presenting gnu emacs, it is a stated goal to get secretaries who were not trained as programmers an entrypoint to begin writing lisp. This is echoed by a much later essay by Strandh noting that lisp, moreso than other languages has a bunch of self-taught eccentrics [].
@ramin_hal9001
3 / >2
I think it might be worth clarifying writing elisp defuns, which I identify with programs, and the practice of writing emacs major and minor modes.
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Nice series of articles.
I would add that both emacs and unix were created to get a job done (both were *originally* about comparatively simple text processing), and had a lot of ad hoc elements to that end, which are awkward to say something cohesive about. It's easier to talk about things that had some over-arching goal to start with and that stuck to that goal/philosophy at all costs -- not that such things happen very often, at least not successfully.
> gnu emacs, it is a stated goal to get secretaries who were not trained as programmers an entrypoint to begin writing lisp.
I can't tell if you had it in mind, but (as is well-documented) Unix began as a system for secretaries. Well, that was their official excuse anyway. :)