4 Sep
2018
4 Sep
'18
6:52 a.m.
On Mon, Sep 03, 2018 at 02:46:14PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
I’m still not clear on why you think acme is a bad citizen. If anything it
makes its windows more accessible to other tools. Unlike emacs or vim
or any IDE. What could acme have differently or what other editor is
not a “bad citizen”.
Ok. I apologize for expressing myself poorly. I give up.
Composability is implicitly the key point in “the Unix
way” but typically
editors are not very composable. Or composable in a different domain.
Similarly GUI. Once you add a human in your composition, further
composability falls apart! A human being the ultimate “do everything”
kitchen sink:-)
I don't consider myself on an equal footing as the tools I use. I don't
"add a human in my composition." I compose. This is a pretty
fundamental difference between me and software.
The question is what can be done to improve
composability beyond the
“Unix way” or plan9 way.
I have about a million questions to answer first, and I suspect the
industry as a whole will collapse and re-form a few times before anyone
gets around to answering that one.
We haven't even fully developed composability in "the unix way" since
market forces seem to have frozen things in a sort of late-1980s amber.
I envy the future generation that rediscovers the core concept and
runs with it, but I doubt I'll be around then. Information technology
is entering an ice age in which general-purpose computing is not
guaranteed to select for survival; the barrier to entry for
understanding systems has never been higher, there is a distinct and
global trend against it, and the cost of thirty years' abuse of Moore's
law is coming due.
Hunter Thompson's high-water mark comes to mind.
I am grateful, for these reasons, for the efforts of people like TUHS
and Bitsavers, so that I can still find and use the tools that were made
back before people confused the simplistic for the simple, even if it
gets harder to make a living with them each passing year.
khm