Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "\"Hey, DT. Does Emacs Violate Unix Philosophy?\" (And Other Questions)" video.

  1. “Unix” is a trademark, that you have to pay a fee to license. Basically, all the platforms that can legitimately call themselves “Unix” nowadays are either dead or dying. What matters is not “Unix” any more, it is very specifically “Linux”.
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  2. 3:49 I think people don’t comprehend what the “Unix philosophy” is. You know the old saying, that a half-truth can often be worse than a total lie? Well, “do one thing and do it well” is one of those half-truths. The small pieces that implement this idea only work because they are built on top of much bigger pieces that do many things: look at the shell itself (whichever one you use), the Linux kernel, the glibc library, the X server, systemd ... each of these is a large piece of code that does many useful things, and does them very well. You would have a very poor platform stack indeed, if you tried to do without them.
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  3. Multi-tasking optimizes response time over throughput. Sometimes you need one, sometimes the other. That’s true of computers, and also of humans, too.
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  4. 17:41 I hope you’re not doing that now.
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  5. 7:05 Only tangentially related, I was reminded of an item by the late Robin Williams I saw a little while back, commenting on Michael Jackson’s addiction to propofol. He said “taking propofol because you can’t sleep is like taking chemo because you’re tired of shaving your head”.
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