Re: Software/HD ecology (was Re:...Bug in Emacs 21.3.50)

[Anil Trivedi <anil@null.invalid>]

> At present the languages number in 10's but soon it may be 100's. I am
> glad they are included. It is not clutter in the *distribution*, but it
> becomes clutter in my *system* if I am stuck with it all with no tools
> to safely select *my* language(s). 
> 
> An analogy might be to ship a fat distribution with binaries for every
> cpu architecture and OS, and expect a user to keep everything because
> it is a lot of work to separate them. That would be stupid. IMHO it
> would be equally stupid to force people to keep 100's of languages they
> have no prayer of learning/understanding/needing in one lifetime.

I just wrote this elsewhere in another context (file attributes) but
once more will do no harm: 

Unix was conceptualized for small systems and programs, where a user
might know every file, and actually need it. Indeed, he either wrote it
himself or copied from a friend he knew, and it was all in one
language, whatever it happened to be. 

Now we have hundreds of thousands of files, know nothing about them,
and routinely install packages that bring thousands of files and
support more languages than the United Nations! All well and good, but
as the system grows, the culture and the tools need to keep up too.

Anil Trivedi