>Instead of proving him wrong about 3 things, can you prove him wrong about 1 thing?
OK. One of the things on his list is, "Concurrent url fetching and downloads". In Emacs Lisp a programmer can call START-PROCESS to invoke wget "asynchronously" (i.e., in such a way that the Emacs process can continue to respond to the user's commands). Moreover, Emacs Lisp includes a way (which I do not remember and cannot easily look up) to arrange for code to be run when the wget process terminates. So obviously this code can read the file downloaded by the wget process, load it into an editing buffer, then bring that buffer (or more precisely a window onto that buffer) into the foreground (or notify the user that it is ready in some other way).
I know enough about Unix to know that START-PROCESS is doing a fork and an exec, and my reading of the source code file /lisp/man.el told me that Unix signals would almost certainly be involved in notifying the Emacs Lisp code when the wget process is done.
START-PROCESS probably does not work on Windows BTW.
ADDED. The above example of concurrency is so simple that it might give the reader a misleading impression about Emacs. So let me just say that although I use OS X, I almost never use Terminal or iTerm or such because I prefer to use Emacs buffers (in shell mode) to interact with Unix shells and other programs with command-line interfaces. If I were to start a long-running computation in one (shell-mode) buffer, I could use Emacs for unrelated tasks while the computation is running.
OK. One of the things on his list is, "Concurrent url fetching and downloads". In Emacs Lisp a programmer can call START-PROCESS to invoke wget "asynchronously" (i.e., in such a way that the Emacs process can continue to respond to the user's commands). Moreover, Emacs Lisp includes a way (which I do not remember and cannot easily look up) to arrange for code to be run when the wget process terminates. So obviously this code can read the file downloaded by the wget process, load it into an editing buffer, then bring that buffer (or more precisely a window onto that buffer) into the foreground (or notify the user that it is ready in some other way).
I know enough about Unix to know that START-PROCESS is doing a fork and an exec, and my reading of the source code file /lisp/man.el told me that Unix signals would almost certainly be involved in notifying the Emacs Lisp code when the wget process is done.
START-PROCESS probably does not work on Windows BTW.
ADDED. The above example of concurrency is so simple that it might give the reader a misleading impression about Emacs. So let me just say that although I use OS X, I almost never use Terminal or iTerm or such because I prefer to use Emacs buffers (in shell mode) to interact with Unix shells and other programs with command-line interfaces. If I were to start a long-running computation in one (shell-mode) buffer, I could use Emacs for unrelated tasks while the computation is running.