15 Nov
2017
15 Nov
'17
3:58 p.m.
On Wednesday, November 15, 2017, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
It took me a while to realize that ed(1) is what TECO
should have been....
Too much TECO trauma scared me away for far too long.... But maybe it was
all the TECO macros I wrote to make the BH100 terminal useful as an editor
in full screen mode....
TECO (and therefore Emacs) and ed(1) represent two completely opposite
views on software development and IT in general. The one is
fanatical about minimalism and 'less is more' approach, while the other
stands for 'more is more'.
That is why MIT and Bell Labs represented two very different cultures. In
the history of computing I have not found any other group of computer
scientists that so deeply emphasized minimalism and 'less is more' approach.
This group produced the original UNIX and C, Plan 9, and Go programming
language. Everything else in the Unix camp including BSD, Linux or GNU was
never about minimalism as its main goals, although one can argue that in
the early years Linux kernel was small and minimal.
--Andy