I generally agree with you. Especially strongly on the point about books.
It is my observation that, just as much as Stack Overflow and various on-line cheatsheets are replacing man pages (which is unfortunate), man pages are replacing info pages. By that I mean they aren't thorough enough. My eyes opened to that point when I started browsing M-x info in my Emacs, and run across documentation of non-Emacs things. Info pages tend to be more like a book than a short manual. And it's great, since if you're going to be using a tool semi-regularly, going through a book explaining it is a boost in learning time and scope.
And as a more general point: I miss the times when software shipped with book-sized manuals.
> run apps in the cloud from the comfort of your own editor". This is in my opinion a sign of the techpocalypse
I guess it depends on where you compose. The above goes against Unix philosophy, but not necessarily against Emacs philosophy. I.e. I consider Emacs as a 2D interface to composable applications (vs. 1D interface a command line is). So a bit of Elisp that implements a cloud API provides a piece that can be composed with just about every other piece of Elisp in Emacs, yielding a solution that's both composable and convenient :).
The issue here in my opinion is not that someone would “run apps in the cloud from your editor”, it’s that a software engineer would need or want an entire SaaS product for such a trivial task.
It is my observation that, just as much as Stack Overflow and various on-line cheatsheets are replacing man pages (which is unfortunate), man pages are replacing info pages. By that I mean they aren't thorough enough. My eyes opened to that point when I started browsing M-x info in my Emacs, and run across documentation of non-Emacs things. Info pages tend to be more like a book than a short manual. And it's great, since if you're going to be using a tool semi-regularly, going through a book explaining it is a boost in learning time and scope.
And as a more general point: I miss the times when software shipped with book-sized manuals.
> run apps in the cloud from the comfort of your own editor". This is in my opinion a sign of the techpocalypse
I guess it depends on where you compose. The above goes against Unix philosophy, but not necessarily against Emacs philosophy. I.e. I consider Emacs as a 2D interface to composable applications (vs. 1D interface a command line is). So a bit of Elisp that implements a cloud API provides a piece that can be composed with just about every other piece of Elisp in Emacs, yielding a solution that's both composable and convenient :).