Saturday, May 28, 2011

Extreme software

Some programs are very successful with taking a paradigm to an extreme.

Emacs tries to represent every user interface as text. Even video editing.

Plan 9 tries to use filesystem trees as APIs for all applications and OS services.


It's interesting to abstract insights gained from extreme programs, and modify them.

We can ask: if Emacs is successful using plain text as user interface, what if we use hypertext?

Or: if Plan 9 is successful in using filesystem trees as APIs, what if we use activity streams?

1 comment:

p4bl0 said...

Actually, Emacs is already using hypertext: this is how you navigate in Emacs help (and more generally in GNU info manual) :-).