19 Nov
2018
19 Nov
'18
8:20 a.m.
On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:05:08 -0700 Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 2:40 PM Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
> Emacs sort of
> violates my UNIX-sense as it does many things instead of doing one thing
> well.
This is only half the story. Unix also provides a way to
assemble these tools to carry out a specific task.
I'd argue that's not a bad thing. When
people tried to add macros to make
or sendmail, you wound up with crazy like imake or the crazy sendfile.m4
stuff. Of course, sendmail and one thing aren't mates, but sometimes you
need to do a few, well chosen things well to avoid the crazy that trying to
misuse something will bring to the table.
The problem was sendmail didn't have a decent builtin glue
language to customize it. More generally, you can't just
provide domain specific objects, you have to provide a domain
specific algebra as well, so to speak. And you don't have to
provide domain specific syntax.