2 Aug
2014
2 Aug
'14
2:28 p.m.
To each their own.
Indeed.
As a Vi user, nothing beats having Esc on the home
row.
A symptom of why I have always detested emacs and vi. With ^D, ^C,
and ^\, Unix has more than enough mystery chords to learn. Emacs
and vi raised that number to a high power--an interface at least
as arcane and disorganized as the DD card in OS 360--baroque
efflorescences totally out of harmony with the spirit of Unix.
(Perhaps one could liken learning vi to learning how to finger
the flute, but the flute pays off with beautiful music. To put the
worst face on vi, it "pays off" only by promoting frantic tinkering.)
A modern-day analog of the undisciplined exuberance of emacs and vi:
for a good time on linux try
less --help | wc
Does comment on taste belong in a discussion of history? I think
so. Unix was born of a taste for achieving big power by small
means rather than by unbounded accumulation of facilities. But
evolution, including the evolution of Unix, does not work that
way. An interesting question is how the corrective of taste manages
ever to recenter the exuberance of evolution. The birth of Unix shows
it can happen. When will it happen again? Can one cite small-scale
examples that gained traction within the larger evolution of Unix?
Doug
2 Aug
2 Aug
2 p.m.
On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 10:28:59AM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
A symptom of why I have always detested emacs and vi.
EMACS - eight megs and constantly swapping :)
I like vi, there is a learning curve but what is better? I tried emacs, it
was too much for my feeble brain.
I used to carry around a version of xvi (a variant that did buffers so you
could split the screen and see two different parts of a file or two different
files). I had hacked that so it used \n as a terminator (I think I wacked
things so that \n or \0 were considered terminators) and made it use mmap
to look at the file. This meant I could fit a ~3MB file in the editor on
a 4MB machine. It was a pretty big win at the time.
Then we got more memory and then vim came along and I've never looked back.
So Doug, ed? Or what? I know some people are fantastic in ed, I used to
be OK especially when I was going in through a serial port but I can't see
using that for serious programming these days. Maybe I'm lame.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
3:51 p.m.
On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 10:28:59AM -0400, Doug McIlroy
wrote:
I like my own version: "Enough Memory? A Concept Strange!"
(That said, I'm a heathen and use nano. Don't care for emacs and the only
vi I can stand is Watcom's.)
-uso.
A symptom of why I have always detested emacs and
vi.
EMACS - eight megs and constantly swapping :) 
4:07 p.m.
Steve Nickolas scripsit:
(That said, I'm a heathen and use nano.
Don't care for emacs and the
only vi I can stand is Watcom's.)
I've used nano, and for that matter Windows Notepad, on occasion.
A proper carpenter knows the use of every tool.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
The peculiar excellence of comedy is its excellent fooling, and Aristophanes's
claim to immortality is based upon one title only: he was a master maker
of comedy, he could fool excellently. Here Gilbert stands side by side
with him. He, too, could write the most admirable nonsense. There has
never been better fooling than his, and a comparison with him carries
nothing derogatory to the great Athenian. --Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way
4:04 p.m.
On 02/08/2014 17:28, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Does comment on taste belong in a discussion of
history? I think
so. Unix was born of a taste for achieving big power by small
means rather than by unbounded accumulation of facilities. But
evolution, including the evolution of Unix, does not work that
way. An interesting question is how the corrective of taste manages
ever to recenter the exuberance of evolution. The birth of Unix shows
it can happen. When will it happen again? Can one cite small-scale
examples that gained traction within the larger evolution of Unix?
With modern facilities (hardware, libraries, distributed open source
development) today's small-scale isn't the same as what it was. If one
considers the exuberant size compared to functionality of Node.js (11M
binary), Emacs (10M), gdb (5.2M), mysql (3.1M), and vim (2.1M), here are
some examples of smaller-scale programs that punch noticeably above
their weight.
- git (1.4M) (as a distributed filesystem with rich metadata and
versioning with configuration management thrown in as a bonus)
- tex (309K)
- curl (154K)
- sudo (121K)
- dot (7.7K plus 730K for its libraries)
- traceroute (53K)
Some libraries that deserve mentioning, when compared to libruby (2.3M),
libxml2 (2.2M), and libpython2.6 (1.6M), are the following:
- libssl (431K)
- liblua (177K)
- C++ STL (816K for /usr/include/c++/4.8.2/bits/stl_*)
* Numbers are "ls -lh" output from a 2014.03 Amazon Linux AMI on which I
had an open shell window.
I also think software package management systems are "small-scale", if
one considers the functionality they offer through the thousands of
packages they can install.
4:03 p.m.
On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 07:04:14PM +0300, Diomidis Spinellis wrote:
- git (1.4M) (as a distributed filesystem with rich
metadata and
versioning with configuration management thrown in as a bonus)
Looking at git like that is sort of like looking at the size of
a dynamically linked app. Ya gotta add in libc and all the extensions
people use to make it not suck.
7:36 p.m.
On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Doug McIlroy wrote:
A modern-day analog of the undisciplined exuberance of
emacs and vi:
for a good time on linux try
less --help | wc
Arrgghh! Same on Mac and BSD systems.
An interesting question is how the corrective of taste
manages ever to
recenter the exuberance of evolution. The birth of Unix shows it can
happen. When will it happen again? Can one cite small-scale examples
that gained traction within the larger evolution of Unix?
Closest I can think of is public key crypto, strong hashes, etc. Easy to
explain in general terms, difficult to implement correctly, and had a heck
of an influence.
-- Dave
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days inactive
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8 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
Benjamin Huntsman -
Dave Horsfall -
Diomidis Spinellis -
Doug McIlroy -
John Cowan -
Larry McVoy -
Steve Nickolas