Re: Emacs, was Re: YAPAS (Yet Another Python Advocacy Story) (fwd)

[Nicolai Rosen <nick@netaxs.com>]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, Adam Turoff wrote:
> > > NR> Besides, emacs is still not Word. I'd like to see somebody do a
> > > NR> word like program in a scripted language (hehe, here's where I
> > > NR> invite people to contradict me).
> > > 
> > > Emacs does a lot more than Word.  If you want to do a point by point
> > > comparison, we can.  
> 
> I don't think that's necessary, since Word is a straw man in this 
> discussion.  Yes, it's a "word processor", and yes, it does have the 
> largest market share in it's class, but it's a false goal.  Should any
> application claiming to be a word processor meet Word feature-for-feature
> or be declared not a word processor because it has not attained parity
> with Word?  Most certainly not.
> 
> It occurs to me that we're discussing emacs-as-word-processor, but no one
> has offered a definition of 'word processor'.  Here's my standard:
> 	- handles simple text editing
> 	- handles multiple fonts, including proportional fonts
> 	- handles styled text
> 	- handles margins and absolute positioning
> 	- provides wysiwyg output 
> 
> That pretty much describes the original MacWrite from 1984.  Everything
> else that Word does is either a bell, a whistle or an interface improvement.
> 
> Should emacs, kword or abiword offer a Legal Pleading wizard in order
> to be considered a word processor?  No.  Should it be able to embed 
> web pages with javascript and applets and offer live updating of those
> documents?  No.
> 
> Word is *not* the gold standard of word processing.  It is an abomination
> that includes the most used word processing environment, as well as a 
> whole host of features that have questionable or dubious merit in a 
> destkop application.

Is it just me, or does anybody else see the logical flaw involved in
attempting to get people to abandon their feature bloated gui intensive
Word like word processors (or whatever you want to call it) in favor of
something else? It would be percieved as going backwards. If you are to
use a scripted language like Python, as the author of the article
proposed, then you will need to be able to write a program like
Word. People will accept no less. People are idiots. It's that simple. All
these semantic games about the definition of a word processor and whether
or not emacs is good, or better than word are immaterial. People will
continue to demand programs like Word, and very shortly will demand
programs that they see as better (translate: bigger bloatware) than
Word. Abomination it may be, but guess what? The next versions will be
even bigger abominations. I seriously doubt that an abomnination bigger
than Word could be done in Python, therefore I doubt that Python will
replace C/C++. And that's w/o even addressing the issue of an Operating
System done in a scripted language.


Nicolai Rosen
nick@netaxs.com
Earthstation/Netaxs

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