[9fans] troff macros for typesetting books/longer texts

[mjkerpan@kerpan.com (Michael Kerpan)]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 11:32 AM, John Floren <john at jfloren.net> wrote:
> Well, I think it's more that Richard Stallman was so ridiculously in
> love with ITS's documentation system (which was pretty good for its
> time, I admit) that he decided to clone it for Unix.
>
> Could the bloat of GNU tools merely be a ploy by rms to force people
> into using info? :)

To be fair, Unix tools were getting bloated even without GNU (cat -v,
anyone?). GNU just introduced the
--verbose-lispmachine-style-option-syntax to the mess. Frankly, I
think that's the problem with a lot of GNU stuff: it was made by RMS
and other folks who mainly came out of the PDP-10 and LISP Machine
tradition which doesn't really mesh well with the Unix tradition.
Programs with lots of options were IMPORTANT when your shell
environment was really just a hacked up version of a debugger from the
mid-60s because you didn't have things like pipes to make programs
play nice together. On the other end, having a verbose syntax didn't
really matter when you were working with a smart LISP system or TWENEX
or some other system with really good completion support. Thus the
problems with GNU can be directly traced to the fact that it was
written by people with brains scrambled by DDT on the one hand and
spoiled by TWENEX and standalone LISP on the other.

Mike