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[Humor] A song about the Emacs Philosophy (www.extrema.is)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A close friend of mine was "inspired" to write a song by my series of blog articles called "Emacs Fulfills the Unix Philosophy" (actually I think he is busting my chops a bit for being an annoying Emacs evangelist, but anyway...) I thought it was pretty funny and worth sharing here.

He wrote the lyrics and used one of those Large Language Models like Stable Diffusion (or something like it) to make the actual music, and settled on a few different renditions of the song. You can listen to them on his website: https://www.extrema.is/blog/2024/04/29/emacs-philosophy

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I enjoyed reading the posts but if I try to take it seriously I can't buy it. The argument stretches "Unix philosophy" so far that Lisp systems end up being a better fit for it than Unix itself. To me that just makes the whole thing lose meaning.

Emacs doesn't particularly fit the Unix philosophy and that's fine! Emacs is a modern day Lisp machine that does an excellent job at integrating with Unix-like systems. It's best to embrace and love it for what it is.

I will go further and say that no GUI or TUI application fits into the Unix philosophy. This includes almost all text editors. I don't consider Vim to be a better fit than Emacs and even vanilla vi is a major stretch unless you only run it in ex mode. The only text editor that more or less fits is ed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The argument stretches “Unix philosophy” so far that Lisp systems end up being a better fit for it than Unix itself. To me that just makes the whole thing lose meaning. Emacs doesn’t particularly fit the Unix philosophy and that’s fine!

Thanks for reading my article, and for your thoughtful comment!

I will go further and say that no GUI or TUI application fits into the Unix philosophy.

I suppose I can agree with you on this point for sure, since the Unix philosophy is not really all that well formulated to begin with (it is a philosophy closely related to the principles of functional programming devised by people who were seemingly not interested in functional programming).

Nonetheless there are people who still insist there is wisdom in the Unix philosophy, which I think is more misguided ritual than carefully-considered principle. The reason I wrote the article was to make people question the utility of this ritual, of drawing an arbitrary border line around a piece of software and saying "within these borders is a tool that does just one thing and does it well."