Hacker News Reader

I can see that emacs (predating Unix) doesn't fit into the Unix philosophy (and I don't see a reason why it should -- it's first and foremost an editor, not a system tool), but

"The editors favored by the original Unix guys are ed, sam, and acme."

doesn't make any sense. vi was the VIsual interface to ed, so ed has all the mystery chords, just expects you to operate blindly.

View on HN

Some of the original Bell Labs Unix people have a very austere view of the Unix philosophy.

In their view, it all started to go wrong -- Unix began to depart from the founding principles -- as early as 1978. In their view, Berkeley Unix does not follow their Unix philosophy -- they don't like network sockets, for example, whose design was mostly imported from some earlier non-Unix system (maybe Tenex?).

Some of this attitude appears in Rob Pike's 'Good, Bad and Ugly' talk from 2001 [1]. He says the early Unix tools approach had, by then, already been replaced for most users by big do-everything programs: Emacs, Perl, browsers...

1. http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com