Emacs and Unix (was: Re: Elisp addiction not as bad in light of Linux forkoholism)

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

"Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>
writes:

> I find it is an essential unixism

Speaking of Unix and Emacs, many Unix devotees like to
bring up the Unix software philosophy, that should
amount to

* software stick to their field, and carry out their
  particular task and nothing else, and that task can
  be very simple indeed
  
* but all software share the same interface - this is
  arguments, pipes, streams, redirection, perhaps even
  shell features like backticks and so on

* and data is always the same: text

This means you can combine simple software to do more
and more complicated things.

People talk about "modular" software, but this
toolchain architecture is by definition modular.

Question is: is Emacs "Unix" as well?

Problem is, the Unix philosophy applies best to batch
software, like CLI computation, old-school black-box
computing where data in one form is inputted, and then
the same data, but modified or arranged differently,
is outputted.

My gut feeling is that Emacs could be Unix only
interactive, and that the text stream data type is the
Emacs buffer. I mean, it is not important for me that
Emacs is Unix, I know there are emacses on many other
OSs, but one sure sees similarities of approaches with
the "one interface, one data type", not to mention the
practical side to have a text editor to navigate and
interact with as system that is all a bunch of
textfiles.

But to some degree, I think Emacs is cooler and more
advanced than Unix. The strength of the Unix system
architecture - that everything are files and processes
- must have been very hard figuring out, but once
there it is a straightforward implementation of a
simple program. Emacs on the other hand is not Unix at
all when it comes to processes and such. But of course
it wouldn't make sense to make Unix to run on top of
Unix...

-- 
underground experts united