From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3cb3dded4b8cad85cd6887800a46bc25@plan9.bell-labs.com> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: [9fans] samuel (fwd) From: "rob pike" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 11:15:53 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5db036a2-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 This all drives home my position on these matters, which is that general purpose tools that work well together almost always trump special purpose tools such as language-specific ones. And even when they don't, they win overall by being applicable to domains far beyond the reach of the special-purpose ones. Acme can integrate mail rather nicely; samuel never had a chance - even a reason to go - in that direction. You can have your IDEs; I'll take a good text editor any day, even if I have to write my own grep to go along with it. (A reasonable grep, even without a regexp library to hand, can be done in a few dozen lines of C. An exercise for the reader.) -rob