{"id":10750,"date":"2022-08-19T14:39:37","date_gmt":"2022-08-19T18:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10750"},"modified":"2022-08-19T14:39:37","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T18:39:37","slug":"emacs-and-the-unix-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10750","title":{"rendered":"Emacs and the Unix Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ramin Honary has a <a href=\"https:\/\/tilde.town\/~ramin_hal9001\/articles\/emacs-fulfills-the-unix-philosophy.html\">six part series of posts<\/a> that presses the claim that Emacs does, in fact, adhere to the Unix Philosophy that a program should do one thing and do it well. Almost everyone else\u2019s opinion is that that makes no sense at all. Emacs, after all, is famous\u2014or infamous, depending on your sensibilities\u2014for its Borg-like assimilation of any computer task that wanders into its event horizon.<\/p>\n<p>But Honary makes the case that Emacs is <i>not<\/i> (merely) an editor but should thought of as in Elisp interpreter. In that sense, the one thing it does well is to run Elisp functions. He goes further and claims that Unix and the Bourne shell are really a sort of proto-functional programming.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s an interesting post although Honary gets a few historical facts wrong. Philip Kaludercic has a post, <a href=\"https:\/\/amodernist.com\/texts\/emacs-unix.html\">Notes on \u201cEmacs fulfills the UNIX Philosophy\u201d<\/a> that helps fill in the blanks.<\/p>\n<p>None of this really matters, of course. If you use Emacs, you don\u2019t care if it adheres to the Unix Philosophy or not. If you don\u2019t use Emacs, you don\u2019t care if it adheres to the Unix Philosophy or not. Still, it\u2019s an interesting idea and worth discussing for its own sake.<\/p>\n<p>One thing Honary says that I absolutely agree with is that Emacs doesn\u2019t have extensions; it has apps. I\u2019ve objected before to referring to Emacs packages as extensions and saner heads told me to relax. Honary provides a logical reason for my more emotional response.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ramin Honary has a six part series of posts that presses the claim that Emacs does, in fact, adhere to the Unix Philosophy that a program should do one thing and do it well. Almost everyone else\u2019s opinion is that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10750\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18,36],"class_list":["post-10750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs","tag-unix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10750"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10751,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10750\/revisions\/10751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}