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

[Nicolai Rosen <nick@netaxs.com>]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, Robert Spier wrote:

> >>>>> "NR" == Nicolai Rosen <nick@netaxs.com> writes:
> NR> I don't really think that that's a fair measure. The higher up
> NR> features that rarely get used are exclusively Lisp while a lot
> NR> more of the lower level stuff is C.
> 
> Sounds like smart programming design.  Make the oft-used stuff really
> fast, and everything else, normal.  And everything important you do is 
> LISP, you cannot run EMACS without running LISP code.  The Emacs
> binary actually does a neat trick to improve loading speed.  They
> initialize the LISP interpreter, and load in the most commonly used
> LISP functions -- at compile time -- and then 'dump' this to disk
> similar to a core file.. Then at runtime, they reload that binary
> image and continue from where they left off.

Whether or not the design of emacs is a Good Thing (tm) is immaterial to
this discussion.

> 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.  But Word v. Emacs stops being appropriate for the
> monger list pretty quickly.  I'm sure we'll find Emacs (and related
> packages) has more features than word, is more configurable than word,
> and does almost everything Word does and enough things Word doesn't,
> to make your issue moot.

Oh, I know it does. Unfortunately Emacs is no Word. I'd like to see a
computer illiterate sit down and use emacs w/ the relative ease that
he/she can use Word. I'm not going to get into the specifics here, but I
think everybody here should know what I'm talking about. The two serve
entirely different purposes and the implementation of each is drastically
different.

> If you want to argue that Word is a typesetter and Emacs is a text
> editor, then you are right.  But Word is a typesetter and Emacs is a
> versatile application programming environment with a useful UI.  (I
> run my mail software within it, among other things.)

Not really. Emacs is more of an operating system than anything else. They
just need to get the hurd into it & it'll be complete :)


Nicolai Rosen
nick@netaxs.com
Earthstation/Netaxs

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