Re: Too fine design granularity leads to numerous macro/function/command existed in Emacs.

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

Arthur Miller wrote:

> You don't believe that programming shell script requires at
> least some programming fluency AND some inside knowledge hot
> the particular tools works, their options, streams etc?
> It just comes out of itself? :)

This isn't a script really but a shell function and this
function in particular is just a wrapper so no, you don't need
to know much more than the chaining of GNU tools there...

>> Everyone that writes it can also combine a bunch of shell
>> tools, but everyone who can combine a bunch of shell tools
>> can't write that - many of them can't program at
>> all, actually.
>
> I don't think I or anyone else claimed that "everyone who
> writes it" (it = shellscripts?)

Putting together a bunch of shell tools with pipes in between
to do some parsing, that's much more easy than to write Elisp.

Shell tools are on the user level, not on the
programmer/engineer level.

> By the way, you do realize that we write this in context of
> Emacs and Elisp and not some random unix tooling context?

Yes but no, what?

> Yes, unix command line tools and piping are like lego blocks, that
> was by design, it does not mean that *everyone* can write shell
> scripts. Everyone *can learn* to write shell scripts, but not everyone
> can write shellscripts.

Forget about the shell script, it is just a wrapper, an
interface for convenience. No, what it amounts to is the use
and combination of 3 tools. (BTW I didn't get the other guy's
suggestion to work, that which only used awk and nothing else
- well, that might be better (I agree) but as for how
difficult it is it is probably *more* difficult than mine
because his requires some understanding of awk beyond the
most basic "pile together a bunch of common tool with their
common/very simple and familiar options".)

So again there is no shell programming, just awk (gawk(1)),
sort(1) and tail(1).

  $ awk '{ print length($0) " " $0; }' $file | sort -n | tail -1

> I hope you realize the difference. And that hypothetical
> *everyone* can also learn how to write elisp if they choose
> so. By the way you know what is also like lego blocks?
> Lisp functions :).

True but that Lego is too difficult for a lot of people while
everyone can pipe together three shell tools.

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