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[Andrew Jarrett]

On Dec 11, 2007 9:29 AM, Brendan <mailinglist at endosquid.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 December 2007, Derek Broughton wrote:
> > Brendan wrote:
> > > On Monday 10 December 2007, Jared Greenwald wrote:
> > >> Not necessarily kde-based, but there is quanta...
> > >
> > > For a newbie? That's like hitting a nail with a nuke.
> >
> > Welcome to the world of Linux.  We tend to go overboard when we do
>
> Not sure what that has to do with anything, especially since it's wrong.
> BTW, been around since Slack on floppies, and since then it's been "The right
> tool for the job", not "We tend to go overboard".

Wouldn't you say that emacs is a little "overboard"?  Have you ever
noticed it has games, usenet integration, a mail reader, a
"psychiatrist" (which only pisses you off more), and other things that
one wouldn't expect to find in a text editor?  Emacs has been around
since the dawn of time, but maybe that is what growth is about --
"overdoing" things and adding more features.  The modern Slackware
seems pretty lightweight, but I'm sure that compared to back then it
may seem "overboard" (i.e. does it still fit on a floppy?).  **Being
the right tool for the job doesn't mean you can only do one job**.  I
wouldn't necessarily call being good at more than one thing "going
overboard", but it makes sense that as more people use Linux, the
capabilities of programs try to spread to meet the demands of the
users.  Not everyone wants to use a program (or OS) for the same
thing, so it only makes sense that a program may seem to go
"overboard" as time passes and users are gained.  I see nothing wrong
with the philosophy of "The right tool for the job" _except_ when it
is used to stagnate development -- which seems to be the idea you are
promoting (i.e. Slackware was designed to be lightweight, so we should
cut feature requests in order to make it fit on a 128 meg flashdrive).
 Then again, I don't see any value in adding an Emacs Psychiatrist,
but I don't think that this is the kind of "overboard" to which Derek
and Jared were referring.  I'm pretty sure that the kind of
"overboard" that Derek and Jared were referring to is closer to "the
_best damn_ tool for the job (I know you could get by with HTML syntax
highlighting, but we're adding code completion and error checking
too!)" and not "the _crappy makeshift_ tool for the job (Sure, I could
see a real psychiatrist, but Emacs has a built-in one!)".  If you
don't like the fact that some people may want to expand software to
better fulfill a purpose (even if its not completely inside of its
scope), then I suggest you reevaluate your understanding of libre
software...

BTW, Emacs and Vim are both great text editors that could be used for
web page creation (if you know HTML), but they would probably a little
more of a nuke than quanta...

Andrew

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