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Comment by yitchelle | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, vim is not strictly vi although they were related.

Amazing, I was 1 year old when both were started. How many other software package has such longevity? Unix and its various guises?

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Not quite as old (circa 1978) but TeX is still alive and well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX

Moreover, TeX has no serious competition (at least in the niche of typesetting mathematical documents). There are plenty of good text editors and IDEs to go around.

What about groff?

How does groff do formulas?

Using separate programs like eqn. (http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/v7man/eqn/eqn2e.ps)

Sorry, but eqn is just not in the same league as LaTeX. It's okay for simple equations, but as can be seen from the document you linked, it produces awful output as soon as the equations become a little bit complex.

Take a look at http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lout/lout-3.40-use... (page 148 and followings).

Lout (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lout) and troff/groff (https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/). Both do equations quite well, I would even prefer lout (it is a way more comfortable than LaTeX), but the lack of additional packages makes it inferior. Troff is older than TeX (not sure how old is eq package).

NetHack is special for me in that it is a game that is in development since 1987, and is still fun to play.

I have a better question. Will those tools be still used in 40 years? And what modern tools will be used after that time?

As long a there are keyboards, there will be Vim.

This is the most beautiful thing I've read all day.

Let's hope not.

Hey, why the downvote? I respect the good work that has been put into emacs and vim over the decades, and the good kick-in-the-but that spacemacs and neovim provide too.

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.

I use these editors for so much more than programming. I'll often have a buffer open just for scratch notes and org-mode for my todo lists. I've written papers for school using LaTeX in emacs too.

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.

Paredit is a textbook leaky abstraction. I find the experience very jank because of it.

how so?

I like the idea that people who want to use things will be able to continue using them in the future. Nobody is forcing you to use them.

Of course I don't want to actually force people to change---that would be a very hollow sign of progress indeed! The hope is something else become vastly more common without anybody being coerced.

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.

I think the down vote is that we see your comment as: "vim & emacs are glorified notepads". At least that is what went thru my head. But they are so much more than a way to type text, with emacs (which I don't grok) I manage my emails archive via gnus/mu/Maildir. Or do "Literal DevOps", check this out for something that still blows my mind with awesomeness: http://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

AWK is from 1977 and I use it almost every day.

I actually love writing programs in AWK. I use Python for that kind of work now, and AWK is relegated to one-liners, but there's something very satisfying about the way programs fit together. It's like playing with Lego.

SPICE is even older, and still used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE

>Unix and its various guises?

Most of the UNIX userland is from then, though it has seen rewrites (including clean room ones) through the decades.

Make is from 1977. GNU Make is somewhat younger.

> To be fair, vim is not strictly vi although they were related.

In the same sense, the emacs most people use is not the original one. Everyone uses GNU Emacs or Xemacs.

I considered that, but I thought it was fair to consider them one in the context of the history of vim vs emacs competition, especially since both the original Emacs and GNU Emacs were written by RMS.

Not very related as it is not a software implementation, but I also find it fascinating how FORTRAN, the first notable programming language is still used today by many after 59 years of its inception.

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