Sam and emacs

[Ozan S. Yigit oz@sis.yorku.ca]

scott deerwester writes in part:
	...
> I'm really hesitant to bring this up...  but the main barrier to me to
> making Plan 9 my major environment is the disdain for emacs.

some consider p9 emacs man page ["this page intentionally left blank"]
to be one of the most profound documents of the recent computing
literature. it says all there is to say.

>								...  I
> *really* appreciate having an editor that is programmable down to its
> bones, in something like a real programming language.
	...

> There's lots that I don't like about emacs, but the fact that it's
> *programmable* means that my productivity as a programmer and generic
> computer professional is about an order of magnitude higher than it
> would have been if I didn't have it.

emacs is an artifact of a computing world in which most programs cannot
be used together to compose other, more interesting work environments.
in that world, editors have at best a mediocre interface to outside
systems, so anything resembling a uniform environment is possible only 
by laboriously re-creating the outside world within the editor. of course,
this re-creation requires a "special" extension language so that the
labor can be transferred to the unsuspecting users, who appearently see
nothing wrong in their remarkable inability to utilize what is already
out there. "oh, we can just program emacs to do that..." sigh.

an alternative to this opeque, incoherent and incompatible world is to
create a transparant, consistent, highly composable environment in which
the "editor" blends into the environment and is naturally extensible by it.
p9 and acme [1] are attempts in that direction, also see oberon [2] for the
implementation details of another such system.

hope this helps.

oz
---
[1] Rob Pike
    Acme: A User Interface for Programmers
    USENIX Conference Proceedings
    San Francisco, Winter 1994.

[1] Wirth & Gutknecht
    Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System & Compiler
    Addison-Wesley, 1993.