Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!bu-cs!buengc!art
From: art@buengc.BU.EDU (A. R. Thompson)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: Why does emacs do so much that is not editing?
Message-ID: <3791@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 16 Aug 89 17:38:54 GMT
References: <19115@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu>
Reply-To: art@buengc.bu.edu (A. R. Thompson)
Followup-To: gnu.misc.discuss
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 21

In article <19115@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu> msw@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Matt S Wartell) writes:
>I have just recently begun using GNU Emacs and am very impressed.
>However, I am curious about a bit of philosophy that seems to be
>behind the emacs way of thought.
>
>In particular, emacs attempts to do everything.  In some ways, this is
>nice; for example, the ability to reconfigure an editor to support
>LaTeX is useful.  However, does an editor really need to know how to
>read mail, post news, run an Eliza session or establish a telnet
>connection?  This seems to be counter to the Unix philosophy of ``a
>tool should do one job and do it well.''
>
>Does GNU emacs do all of these `extra' tasks because it can, or is there
>a compelling reason to do everything from within the editor?
>
>Please, do not read this as a criticism of the support packages that
>come with emacs, but rather as a query regarding the Buddha nature (:-) 
>of emacs.

Because in reality emacs is a lisp system that happens to have a lot of
built in editing functions.