
Advantages of everything-is-text - llambda
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/12/30/advantages-of-everything-is-text/
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heyrhett
Can someone please explain why "John D Cook"'s blog makes the front page so
often? I see that he has a large boat.

Who is his target audience here? I have been using emacs for over 10 years,
and this is possibly one of the weakest arguments I've ever heard of for
someone to try emacs.

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jamesrcole
Re: the large boat, I imagine that's a photo of (a replica of) The Endeavour
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Endeavour>), sailed by Captain Cook. Given
that The Endeavour is both the blog's and the image's name, and that the blog
author's surname is Cook.

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blacksqr
Yet ironically the author of emacs virulently despises Tcl, which is founded
on precisely the same concept.

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bch
I don't think Stallman despised Tcl because of its EIAS (Everything is a
String) philosophy. He was wary of the Tcl relationship (at that time) with
Sun Microsystems, and Stallman was a longtime Lisper anyway; I wouldn't be
surprised if his opinion was that everything outside of Lisp sucked.

EIAS is a powerful concept, though, which with Tcl's conceptually simple rules
allow it to be homoiconic (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconic>) and
allow for some interesting and _pleasant_ programming.

To head off one common misconception of EIAS, Tcl does _not_ actually
internally represent its code only as strings. It byte-compiles. Pure string-
only parsing was replaced with byte-compiled code in 1997.

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g3orge
in other words: UNIX

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gcb
Take a look in plan9 and Sam/acme if you really want to extrapolate on
everything is text.

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phren0logy
Is there a port of it you'd recommend looking at? The only ones I've found
look abandoned (Plan9 from User Space, and Acme Stand Alone Complex).

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dexen
Plan 9 from User Space is active; it both tracks mainline Plan 9 distribution
and includes own improvements. I'm using it daily, both at work and privately;
I especially love using Acme over networked X11 protocol -- great performance
for a GUI app.

Go see for yourself: <http://code.swtch.com/plan9port/changesets>

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phren0logy
Huh, I stand corrected. Thanks, looking forward to playing with it.

