On: Finish your stuff

[emodendroket]

> I thought the Unix philosophy embraced the idea of "small tools that do one thing really well."

Big monoliths are too useful to go away. Does emacs "do one thing and do it well?" No, it does a million things, some of them better than others. Nevertheless, lots of Unix guys use it.

[agentultra → emodendroket]

Emacs does do one thing and one thing well: it runs elisp code.

The image just happens to have a text editor and a bunch of other useful utilities built-in.

[yellowapple → agentultra]

To expand on this, each elisp package tends to do one thing and do it well. The majority of my Emacs workflow is basically just a bunch of small, single-purpose elisp programs that get used alongside one another.

Emacs looking like the antithesis of the Unix philosophy is only because the Unix nature is deeply embedded within it.

[emodendroket → yellowapple]

That hardly describes all of them.

[yellowapple → emodendroket]

It describes a rather substantial majority of them. There are exceptions, sure, but that changes very little of Emacs' Unix nature.

[s73v3r → agentultra]

I think that's stretching the meaning of the philosophy quite a bit.

[senderista → emodendroket]

Perl is another counterexample (it was partly born from dissatisfaction with the Unix philosophy).