Sam and emacs

Sam and emacs

[Scott]

I knew that I was going to regret bringing this up. :-)

Let's see if I've got this right: the Big Philosophical Reason
that the emacs page is blank in the Plan 9 manual is something
like:

  Okay, fine, emacs has wonderful functionality, and is
  extensible, etc, etc...  but the things that make emacs
  a wonderful tool ought to apply to a whole flinking operating
  environment, not an editor, for Pete's sake.  That's exactly what
  Plan 9 was written for -- to be an operating system that does,
  in a modular and sensible way, what emacs does in a horrible
  monolithic way.

So I really ought to be comparing emacs with Plan 9 (and in
particular with acme, which is the part of the whole Plan that
meets the same goals that emacs-as-world-view meets), and not
with sam, which is a very nice *editor*, like God and Rob
intended.

Am I getting close?

Geez, I only just now realized that acme is a pun on "emacs".
Rob, can I buy a clue, please?

Sam and emacs

[Bob]

um, I think comp.os.research is a more appropriate place for this
discussion. This is "9fans" and not "emacsfans" after all.

Bob.

Sam and emacs

[rsalz]

> Ugh. An editor is for editing text files. A programming language is for
> writing programs. Never the twain shall meet, ideally.

You don't really believe that.

Sam and emacs

[Pete]

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

Ugh. An editor is for editing text files. A programming language is for
writing programs. Never the twain shall meet, ideally.

>It's not that
>I'm addicted to left-meta-shift-coke bottle style interfaces, but...
>I really don't understand the "this page intentionally left blank"
>attitude.  I mean, the fact that you can build things like ange-ftp
>and WWW mode is *really* nice!  How do accomodate the same sort of
>thing in sam?

You don't. Read Rob's papers on Help, and Acme. He's built environments in
which text and programs interact (relatively) seamlessly, and instead of a 
monolithic (or do I mean neolithic :-)) environment like emacs, you have 
small, neat, integrated tools.


>And I don't know how to function without emacs' gdb
>mode!  The fact that the editor itself can put me at the line where
>the music stopped, and I've got a full honest-to-God editor under me
>without having to go, "Uh.. lessee.. that was line 136 in file
>blurfle.c..".  And when I recompile, I have all of the error messages
>in a buffer, and need two keystrokes per syntax error (which adds up
>if you've got enough syntax errors ;-) to page through them and fix
>them -- again, with a real editor.
>

Again, you should read Rob's paper on Help, which shows a wonderful example
of debugging -- he shows how to track a bug down to an individual line in a 
source file without even typing one character...

>And then there's guess-indent mode that does about as good a job as I
>can at figuring out where I probably wanted the cursor after the line
>wraps, and abbrev mode, which now auto-corrects all of my most common
>typos -- watching somebody's face when I type "taht " and they see the
>"a" and the "h" switch places as soon as I hit the space is kind of
>fun.

This is pretty much a matter of taste. You can probably hack autoindent
into Sam if you want it; but as far as auto-correction goes I prefer "what 
you type is what you get"... I don't like the editor messing around with my 
input!

>
>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.
>

>The most common complaint that I hear about emacs is that there are
>too many blasted things to learn -- and the learning curve *is* really
>steep.  But that doesn't seem to be the reason for the intentional
>blank page in the Plan 9 manual.  Would somebody please enlighten me?
>

There are some Good Things in the emacs philosophy -- multiple
buffers, powerful regular expressions, a fairly reasonable text-selection 
mechanism, etc. In fact, many of the things I like about Sam!

However, there are also some Very Bad Lurking Horrors in it -- particularly 
the use of Lisp as  implementation/extension language, and the sheer bulk of 
"modern" emacs.

all subjective,
Pete
--
Peter Fenelon: Research Associate: High Integrity Systems Engineering Group, 
Dept of Computer Science, University of York, York, Y01 5DD +44/0 904 433388
Email:pete@minster.york.ac.uk *There's no room for enigmas in built up areas

Sam and emacs

[Ozan]

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.

Sam and emacs

[Scott]

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

At Usenix Rob was kind enough to let me play with acme (running on a
laptop pc) for a while, and it seemed like acme is sufficiently
extensible to be able to do most of the interesting things that are
attractive about emacs.  It was pretty impressive, really.

Acme is extensible by using external agents, more like XEDIT and REXX
under VM/CMS than like emacs, actually.  So if someone ports a Scheme
interpreter to Plan 9, who needs elisp? :-)

Sam and emacs

[Scott]

Vijay writes:

>> However, I think Rob Pike has said that they are trying
>> to get Plan 9 publicly released.  I assume he means as
>> free software along the lines of awk or sam.  I believe
>> this is the only way Plan 9 will ever have a chance to see
>> the widespread use it deserves, and so I hope very much
>> that this happens.
> 

> Oh god, I think the earth moved for me.
> I am drumming up support for plan 9 here, but when I say it
> doesn't run emacs, people lose all interest and the weird thing
> is that after about 2 weeks of running sam, I would hate to go
> back to emacs, and I am a die hard emacs/vi fan.  But most people
> don't seem to be willing to take the time to learn sam properly.
> People I showed sam to... oh whats the point.

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.  I
*really* appreciate having an editor that is programmable down to its
bones, in something like a real programming language.  It's not that
I'm addicted to left-meta-shift-coke bottle style interfaces, but...
I really don't understand the "this page intentionally left blank"
attitude.  I mean, the fact that you can build things like ange-ftp
and WWW mode is *really* nice!  How do accomodate the same sort of
thing in sam?  And I don't know how to function without emacs' gdb
mode!  The fact that the editor itself can put me at the line where
the music stopped, and I've got a full honest-to-God editor under me
without having to go, "Uh.. lessee.. that was line 136 in file
blurfle.c..".  And when I recompile, I have all of the error messages
in a buffer, and need two keystrokes per syntax error (which adds up
if you've got enough syntax errors ;-) to page through them and fix
them -- again, with a real editor.

And then there's guess-indent mode that does about as good a job as I
can at figuring out where I probably wanted the cursor after the line
wraps, and abbrev mode, which now auto-corrects all of my most common
typos -- watching somebody's face when I type "taht " and they see the
"a" and the "h" switch places as soon as I hit the space is kind of
fun.

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.

The most common complaint that I hear about emacs is that there are
too many blasted things to learn -- and the learning curve *is* really
steep.  But that doesn't seem to be the reason for the intentional
blank page in the Plan 9 manual.  Would somebody please enlighten me?