Re: [9fans] Acme without Flamage

["Robert Raschke" <rtrlists@googlemail.com>]

One of the central tenets of Plan 9 is that everything is a file. So
all file based activities are really, really easy.

Most OO programming appears to follow a more DB oriented style (at
least those with horrendous packaging/module mechanisms). That files
are used to store your programs appears to be incidental. Therefore
using a file oriented system when programming something like Java is
painful, to say the least.

Thus, acme is very probably not the right editor, unless you are in
complete control of the code. But I would say the same holds for vi or
emacs. Its just that those two have had a lot of additions poured into
them that were inspired by the IDE world.

Acme is supremely fabulous when you are in complete control or if
you're programming using a language/environment where there are no
strange rules on where your files have to go (the underlying OO DB,
essentially).

Initially, all that replacing vi/emacs with acme does is change your
habits from keyboarding to mousing. All the pain you get from the
"bad" code remains the same. Some of the IDE inspired features in
vi/emacs may help lessen that pain slightly. But to get a more radical
change, I'm afraid using a proper IDE is where it happens. Welcome to
objects, good-bye files.

Robby