According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs) both vi and Emacs are from 1976. 40 years this year!
Amazing, I was 1 year old when both were started. How many other software package has such longevity? Unix and its various guises?
That said, programing via editing text is a completely primitive method, and I hope things like http://unisonweb.org/ will replace it.
Even if one is not on-board the structured editing concept, with so much changing about the way we use computers and the software we run on time, the fact that our development methods have changed far less is quite anomalous and deserves critique.
If you're editing a lisp in emacs, you can already get halfway there with plugins like paredit or smartparens. You are pretty much editing the AST at that point.
Today's IDEs are clearly not superior in all respects, or emacs and vim wouldn't have the usage they do. I hope whatever comes next can be more uniformly better.
Most of the UNIX userland is from then, though it has seen rewrites (including clean room ones) through the decades.
In the same sense, the emacs most people use is not the original one. Everyone uses GNU Emacs or Xemacs.
Vim can be invoked to conform to the vi standard, although usually it only gets used that way when a vim user is on an unfamiliar machine.
[0] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/vi.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification
Not only in the sense that Vim is a clone of vi (with added stuff), but more specifically in that in lots of distros the vi command is just vim (with some special flags).
Old BSD vi today is, and has been for over a decade or so, dead.
Actually it does, as architectures, APIs, etc change, and if the software doesn't catch up, it can get impossible to run it, or it will need BC compatibility layers, to run 5-10-15 years down the line.
Not to mention big changes in how we use the software, e.g. the need to handle utf-8, which didn't exist in Bill Joy's time.
>It's not dead, it's finished. It's got all the features of the original vi, therefore mission accomplished.
Huh? "got all the features of the original vi"? We ARE talking about the original vi.
I have to politely but firmly disagree. Software rots if it's not being actively maintained.
Underlying API/ABI's get deprecated and eventually dropped, dependencies reach end-of-life and need to be replaced, and so on.
Take one program today and try to run it in 10 years, as is. I bet it won't work.
I'm talking of course, of any non-trivial piece of code. "Fizzbuzz" written in an interpreted language... it might even run if you're lucky.
(Edit: formatting)
But BSD vim (nvi) is maintained as part of the base systems of the BSDs, so it changes with system changes although it's in maintenance mode. E.g.:
So
> *Software doesn't need to be developed ad-aeternum to remain 'alive'.*
> Software doesn't need to be developed ad-aeternum to remain 'alive'.
(Not that this is an important issue.)
Edit: also, vi is not dead: www.archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/vi
No, it's a derivative project. However, in lots of distros, when one runs "vi" they are actually running "vim" (in vi standards mode).