Re: Elisp addiction not as bad in light of Linux forkoholism

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl>]

On 2014-11-30, at 01:06, Emanuel Berg wrote:

> It is simple: Don't fork - program.

Wow, it's rant time!

So you're in for a treat: I have a spare minute, and let me share a
story with you.  (I guess I read it in some interview, I don't remember
now.)

When DEK coded TeX (and published the cource code), he thought that many
people will actually customize TeX (=the engine) to their needs.  It
turned out that (apparently) the macro programming was more powerful
than he expected: almost nobody did that, people did wonderful things at
the macro level, without ever touching the source code (apart from
increasing the memory constraints, which required recompliation back
then).  This includes not only LaTeX and its styles (later: classes and
packages), but also a BASIC and Lisp interpreters, a few numerical
engines, a regex engine (recently), an XML parser and much more.  (This
is, in fact, an oversimplification; some of these things require e-TeX,
which is a relatively small extension to the engine.)

The real hacking on the underlying engine did happen, of course, but not
that often.  Most notably, we have e-TeX, pdfTeX (which is great),
pdfeTeX (which combines both of them); then we have XeTeX (originally
only on Mac, now also Win and Linux), Omega and Aleph, and - most
recently - LuaTeX (which is the most serious modification, and a very
well designed one AFAIK).  (There were admittedly smaller extensions,
like encTeX, but they could be technically just patches, not "forks".)
Not really that many "forks", for a program more than 30 years old.
Especially that eTeX and pdf(e)TeX are not considered forks now, rather
legal successors (hardly anyone uses the original tex engine nowadays),
and LuaTeX gains more and more traction; some (me included) hope that it
will mostly replace the more conservative versions some day.  (LuaTeX is
AFAIK the only one which took the idea of giving TeX really new things
seriously.)

(Well, there was also NTS, but it was really a clone, not a fork, and it
is almost "evaporated" in Orwellian sense (even the sources are nowhere
on the 'net!) - go figure.)

I guess it is a bit similar as in the Emacs world.  If you make a
program flexible enough, people won't fork it too much - they just won't
need it.  (The existing forks solved some /real problems/: 8-bit-ness
with Omega, complicated dvi->ps->pdf route with pdfTeX, limited
registers and other constraints with eTeX, impossibility of RtL
typesetting with Omega and XeTeX, lack of access to system fonts with
XeTeX, problems with advanced programming and other things with LuaTeX.)

Just my 2 cents.

(And re: Debian vs Ubuntu, I never used Debian, but Ubuntu is a huge
disappointment: it has been less and less usable recently (especially
compared to, say, five or seven years ago), and it will be kicked out of
my machine when I have a few spare days to do a reinstall.)

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University