I've never gotten one iota of use from any of the tools you mention, though, I
have a "friendlified" version of EMACS. These are all development-related
tools. Software development only qualifies as useful work in the rare case
that you're involved in software development. For everyone else, it's
overhead, which is less than useless. Even in hardware development, the
software is a burden. It's a burden on the cost of other goods and services.
Friendlier OS' (e.g. Windows) have equivalent tools that are less onerous in
the demands they place on the user. Just ask the typical programmer what a
"regular expression" is. Better yet, give him a task requiring the use of
grep for a list of, say, 100 words and phrases. When he complains after about
a week that he's not made much progress, THEN ask him what a regular
expression is.
BTW, in response to someone else's comment regarding EMACS and schematic
capture or whatever, the first schematic program I used under UNIX was written
in EMACS, which has a substantial LISP interpreter built in, or attached, or
whatever. I was unimpressed until I learned that it was written as a set of
macros. It was slow, but, for 1985, and compared with terminal-based CP/M, it
was pretty impressive.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "R. D. Davis" <rdd_at_rddavis.org>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 10:03 PM
Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)
> Quothe Richard Erlacher, from writings of Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at
06:17:34PM -0600:
> > etc. I've yet to see even one piece of software that would be of
> > serious use to me that runs under UNIX. I know that I could force
> > myself to use Netscape,
>
> How can anyone do anything useful with a computer without the
> following? Emacs, TeX/LaTeX, dvips, the Bourne shell for scripts,
> ghostview, gimp, xv, PostgreSQL or Oracle, Perl, C, various useful
> UNIX utilities (e.g. tar, awk, nawk, grep, sed, dc, ed, diff, cal, at,
> bc, od, lint, etc.), to name a very few of the extremely useful
> programs that run on UNIX systems.
>
> --
> Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other
animals:
> All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature &
> rdd_at_rddavis.org 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify
such
> http://www.rddavis.org beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 22 2002 - 00:48:00 BST