help-gnu-emacs
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: line-move-visual


From: Uday S Reddy
Subject: Re: line-move-visual
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:13:37 -0000
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Thunderbird/3.0.4

On 6/10/2010 8:57 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:


Based on the amount of bugs in Emacs, the wishy-washy semantics of most
of its operations, the quick&dirty half-solutions seen in most of its
packages, it amazes me that someone would consider Emacs as
mission-critical ;-)

Mission-critical software isn't necessarily perfect software.  What software is?

Mission-critical software requires a clean architecture, attention to fundamental notions of reliability, a design that can isolate any potential problems and an ability to recover from them. Even though you seem to think the semantics of the Emacs operations is wishy-washy (and I have pointed out some of them to you myself), the Emacs manuals - both the user's manual and the programming manual - are of quite high-quality and do an excellent job of defining things. We can generally spot the portions that are wishy-washy or too complicated for comfort and stay away from them. The use of Lisp with type safety and memory safety means that even inexperienced programmers can usually deliver code of decent quality. The various fail-safe mechanisms, such as autosave, backups, movemail etc, help for failure recovery. The large, professional user base, along with its age, imply that most problems have been identified and fixed a long time ago. The small developer community might also mean that it grows at a manageable pace (even though that seems to be changing now).

When I was trawling through the net, I found somebody say that nobody ever lost an email message in VM (the Emacs package for email that I currently maintain). When I enquired about it, it was pretty much true. There is only one known instance of mail folder corruption, which happened due to the unibyte-multibyte transition of Emacs around the same time that Kyle Jones was retiring from VM. So, the transition was apparently half-done and wasn't discovered until much later.

In comparison, I have lost loads of emails in Microsoft tools, lost files or changes to files in the Office Suite, had files damaged by Sun-Microsoft file servers, and had damaging system crashes due to hardware/device driver faults. On the whole, Emacs has been among the most reliable of all the tools I use. And, I suspect that must be true for almost all of us here. So, please do own up to this proud heritage!


         Stefan "who never uses Emacs while root"

I guess you will have to amplify this point for us to draw the right conclusions from it.

Cheers,
Uday


reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]