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A comment on Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014).

Re:Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014) by 505 on Friday June 10, 2016 @05:19AM (#11875185)
Perhaps classic McIlroy: calling Emacs and vi "baroque efflorescences totally out of harmony with the spirit of Unix"
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Re:Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014) by byuu on Friday June 10, 2016 @06:51AM (#11875476)
They are pretty words, for sure, but I'm not sure what "intricately designed blooming flowers" (baroque efflorescences) is supposed to even mean in this context.

It feels like a sesquipedalian circumlocution by an ebullient iconoclast :P

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Re:Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014) by catnaroek on Friday June 10, 2016 @07:04AM (#11875518)
One of the meanings of “baroque” is “Extravagant, complex, or bizarre, especially in ornamentation”, or so DuckDuckGo tells me: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define+baroque. Also see: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340....

And it's pretty clear that McIlroy used “efflorescence” as a metaphor for “proliferation (of features)”. This usage of “bloom” and its synonyms isn't uncommon.

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Re:Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014) by 505 on Friday June 10, 2016 @07:51AM (#11875683)
Perhaps he's saying vi users should be using ed, and emacsers TECO. Or maybe just magnetised needles.
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