Why you should be willing to believe that ed(1)
is a good editor
Among the reactions to
my entry on how ed(1)
is no longer a good editor today was people wondering out loud if ed
was
ever a good editor. My answer is that yes, ed
is and was good
editor in the right situations, and I intend to write an entry
about that.
But before I write about why ed
is a good editor, I need to write
about why you should be willing to believe that it is. To put it
simply, why you should believe that ed
is a good editor has nothing
to do with anything about its technical merits and everything to
do with its history.
Ed was created and nurtured by the same core Bell Labs people who
created Unix, people like Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.
Ed wasn't their first editor; instead, it was the end product of a
whole series of iterations of the same fundamental idea, created
in the computing environment of the late 1960s and early to mid
1970s. The Bell Labs Unix people behind ed
were smart, knew what
they were doing, had done this many times before, had good taste,
were picky about their tools, used ed
a great deal themselves,
and were not afraid to completely redo Unix programs that they felt
were not up to what they should be (the Unix shell was completely
redesigned from the ground up between V6 and V7, for example). And
what these people produced and used was ed
, not anything else,
even though it's clear that they could have had something else if
they'd wanted it and they certainly knew that other options were
possible. Ed is clearly not the product of limited knowledge,
imagination, skill, taste, or indifference to how good the program
was.
It's certainly possible to believe that the Bell Labs Research Unix
people had no taste in general, if you dislike Unix as a whole; in
that case, ed
is one more brick in the wall. But if you like Unix
and think that V7 Unix is well designed and full of good work, it
seems a bit of a stretch to believe that all of the Bell Labs people
were so uniquely blinded that they made a great Unix but a bad
editor, one that they didn't recognize as such even though they
used it to write the entire system.
Nor do I think that resource constraints are a convincing explanation.
While the very limited hardware of the very earliest Unix machines might
have forced early versions of ed
to be more limited than prior editors
like QED, by the time
of V7, Bell Labs was running Unix on reasonably good hardware for the
time.
The conclusion is inescapable. The people at Bell Labs who created
Unix found ed
to be a good editor. Since they got so much else
right and saw so many things so clearly, perhaps we should consider
that ed
itself has merits that we don't see today, or don't see
as acutely as they did back then.
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