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by stormking 18 days ago
Emacs is a LISP refugee in Unixland. It doesn't follow the Unix philosophy, it follows the LISP philosophy. But it integrates.

Forgot where I found this.

1 comments

Bash is a shell refugee in Unixland. It doesn't follow the Unix philosophy, it follows the Shell philosophy. But it integrates.

Why do you say such silly things?

Unix philosophy clearly favors and privileges certain methods of composition and interoperation. C-calls, program invocation, files and sockets/pipes. Calls inside various vms like lisp, java, python or wasm are not among those.
Emacs is a more usable interface to all those methods of composition than, say, a terminal emulator. Take dired for example; it presents the verbatim output of the ls command but allows me to interact with it in a much smoother way to rename, copy, and run arbitrary shell commands on them.

Why is it acceptable to compose simple modular tools in a bash script but not in an Emacs script?