Re: What is emacs architecture ?

[Fren Zeee]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Masatake YAMATO <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Hello greets everyone.
> >
> > I am a newbie interested in knowing some basic architecture of emacs. I hope
> > some of you gurus would make it easy for a newbie like me to understand it.
> >
> > I would assume that you would have a big mental picture of the program and
> > then a more detailed picture. It is not possible to manage such a huge
> > program without a crisp concept.
> >
> > If emacs is a meta-recursive lisp interpreter then that serves as pseudo
> > code for it.
> >
> > Does someone have a UML, FSM or any other pictorial representation, or
> > textual representation of the big picture of emacs ?
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Franz Xe
>
> (I've not read yet but) ``Beautiful Architecture, 1st Edition'', published 
> from O'Reilly may help you.
> Ih chapter 11 Jim Blandy wrote about the architecture. of Emacs.
> http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780596155780/emacs?reader=pf&readerfullscreen=&readerleftmenu=1
>
> Masatake YAMATO

I took a look at whatever there was on safari, google and amazon. The
reviewers at amazon are quite correct that the book has no useful
information. The specific chapter 11 has no new information, or much
of value about the emacs internals.

Here is a review quoted:

About the Author
Diomidis Spinellis is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of
Economics and Business, Greece. His research interests include
software engineering, programming languages, internet information
systems, computer security, and intelligent optimization methods. He
holds an MEng in Software Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science
both from Imperial College London.

By  Amrit Tiwana "www.bus.iastate.edu/tiwana" (Decatur, Georgia, USA)
- See all my reviews

This review is from: Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal
the Hidden Beauty in Software Design (Paperback)
The book suffers from a "too many cooks" problem; it is a very timely
book but lacks cohesion across chapters. I agree with the other
reviewer that it has way too many pages about nothing. This is simply
a good example of where each chapter is written by an "authority" on
architecture but the chapters are disjointed and lack a consistent
message. I loved the title, and idea behind the book, but it
overpromises and underdelivers. But there are some redeeming features.

Good topics, Half baked, March 11, 2009
By  Lior Bar-On (Israel) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

The books starts with a "What is architecture" article (AMAZING!
almost any book about architecture has that! can't we finally agree
and deprecate this discussion?!)
Other articles arrange by topics: enterprise (server) architecture,
client architecture, etc...

What really annoyed me while reading this book, and lowered two stars
for it, is the repeating rhythm of the articles:
They start slow and punctuality (That's ok), getting warmer, getting
into a really interesting point and puff - suddenly the article ends.
It's like making many preparations (warming the oven, preparing raw
materials), putting the cake in, but closing it over before the cake
is done. Shame!