[TUHS} Running V8 ... [ really basic tools ]

[Jon Steinhart]

Clem Cole writes:
> On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 7:58 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
>     This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My
>     favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works
>     everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about.
> 
> +1 I would add, to me that's what the 'standardization' efforts were really
> about as a >>user<<.   To settle on the minimum subset needed to the get the
> job do and stop adding 'sugar' because you could.  The ISVs wanted to maximize
> (SPEC1170 et al), but to me 'Universal' was what do I really need/use every
> day.
> 
> In fact, its why I switch from EMACS to vi early in my UNIX career.   Vi and
> (ed) were everywhere (K&P style).  EMACS was not and if I found a flavor for
> that system, it was always 'different.'  I could sit down at anything from
> MS-DOS to a Cray and stuff worked well enough that I could do what I needed to
> do.  [I'm not a great fan of "vim" for that reason either BTW -- I just want
> the basics to 'be there' and 'be reliable' - do what I want without me having
> to rethink].

I have a similar and maybe even more extreme position.  When I was a manager
I placed restrictions on the tools and customizations for members of my team.
My goal was to make sure that any team member could go over to any other team
member's desk and get stuff done.  I strongly pushed vi as an editor because
it was "standard"; as Clem said every emacs seemed to be different.  I prohibited
the redefinition of the vi key bindings and also any shell aliases that replaced
standard commands.  Nothing worse for productivity than going to help out a
colleague and then discovering that they the redefined "ls" as "rm"!

Jon