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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

It is definitely an interesting editor, and it has some neat ideas. But when I compare the masterpiece that is Acme on Plan 9 with the — frankly — cobbled-together heap that is Emacs … I would prefer to use Emacs, because Emacs does more for me than Acme on Plan 9.

I think that says a lot about the fundamental power of dynamic languages in general and Lisp in particular. Plan 9 is in a lot of ways the zenith (or … heh … acme) of what C and Unix can do. It is awesome, it is wonderful, it is better in every technical way than Linux or true Unix. But it pales in comparison to the hacked-together incomplete Lisp machine that is Emacs.

Imagine how much better off we would be with true Lisp machines on our desks and in our data centres!

(in my ideal world this 21st-century Lisp machine would actually take a lot of ideas from Plan 9, and even some from Emacs)

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Have you had a look at Oberon? That's where Acme took most of its stuff from, and it being a fully integrated language, the interfaces between the parts are a lot cleaner.

That's what Oberon, Smalltalk and even Emacs Lisp have that's not as good in Unix. Files full of plain text plus executables are a good foundation, but they're also quite unstructured and so is communication between them. Command line parameter parsing is an absolute nightmare. Whereas if you use a language directly, that's just function parameters and you're also not restricted to arrays of strings as your sole communication format.

Not that Emacs is doing all that it can with that, as it's usually used as an intermediary between a high-falutin' language environment and text files.

> Have you had a look at Oberon?

No, but it is on my list of things to look at when I get some free time. It sounds like another one of those tantalising might-have-beens.

One of my retirement projects will be to write an OS as it should be, given what we have learned from decades of research and use. I imagine that I will never complete it, but it will give me something to do with my time!

> is the acme of what C and Unix can do

No way, acme is just ONE direction for Unix and C. Vi is another direction, as well as a ton of other editors that were made for Unix and C.

I was making a pun: 'acme' means the highest point.

But I also disagree with you: acme is strictly more powerful than vi, and vim is just a Greenspunned Emacs. Greenspun's Tenth Rule holds that 'any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp'; I contend that vim is an ad-hoc, informally-specified[0], bad-taste (seriously, have you ever looked at Vimscript?) reimplementation of Emacs's functionality.

It does, however, have better keybindings than Emacs does by default.

0: outside of the POSIX stuff it gets from vi, that is

Emacs is built on Unix like vi and everything else. The fact that vi has a less elegant language doesn't affect me, because I don't see much value in adding extensions to the editor. What I need is a sane user interface, which vim provides.

The original Emacs was written for Multics at a time when people outside of Bell Labs were largely unaware of the existence of Unix[1]. It also doesn't follow the Unix philosophy of making small CLI utilities composed with pipes. As I understand it (though I haven't used it), Acme is extended with external programs which communicate through pipes just like the traditional Unix utilities.

[1]: https://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html

The first version of Emacs was not made in lisp, instead it used TECO, a horrible programming editor/programming language.

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