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Comment by forensic | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of carpenters who use old hammers.

Sometimes the old thing is really the best solution, and attempts to improve it are misguided and fail. Carpenters will give the newfangled tools an honest shot and then decide that the old tools had a certain je ne sais quoi that made them better.

It's not that you can't build a better hammer. Nailguns do exist. But still.. nailguns aren't hammers. A scaffolder can't use a nailgun to do his work, for instance. But I bet the guy who invented the nailgun claimed it would totally replace hammers and just forgot to consider the scaffolders. And now laymen on the outside ask, "What are those scaffolders doing carrying around hammers in 2011? That tech is like a million years old! Surely we can do better!?"

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The difference is that in the case of hammer vs. nailgun, the old solution (the hammer) is the simple one, and the new solution (the nailgun) is the complex one.

With editors it's the other way around. Old editors are in no way simple, quite the contrary. Emacs is complex, and Vim, while seemingly simple, is complex once you want to change its default mode of working.

As in the case with the hammer, simple tools often work best - but in the world of editors, the new tools are often the simplest ones.

It's not clear that nailguns are more complex than hammers. What is the measure of complexity? Nailguns are easier to use for a complete newbie, so a nailgun could be seen as a simpler tool. Becoming an expert hammer user takes literally years.

There are many different ways to measure complexity. Learning curve, interface, potential for virtuosity, amount of time implementation took, etc.

Nailguns are wayyyyy simpler to use than a hammer.

As a one-time (long ago) silver smith, I can tell you that while there were more than 30 hammers on the wall, there was not one nail-gun. A brief tour of books on subjects from book-binding to leather engraving should demonstrate that there is not a one-size fits all replacement for a tool whose many forms have been developed over centuries (if I handed you a hammer used by a roman carpenter, you would know a.) what it was and b.) how to use it) is just silly. Try making the last finishing cut with a carving tool using a nailgun before you say anything about simplicity...

I think you missed my point. What you're saying actually supports my opinion on this issue.

Okay, I wasn't aware of that. I still think modern editors are simpler and easier to deal with than Emacs and Vim, but that's a different story.

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