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

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

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

> 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.

Ehhhh .... good night.