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Comment by Johanx64 | Hacker News Reader

"Most is software is written using a some text editor."

What an astute fucking observation you've made, mate!

And so it happens, that webdevs and web infra people (which is the extent of your understanding of "high quality shit") tend to use unixes and consequently vim/emacs as their text editor. No fucking way!

Perhaps, you can even tell just by looking at a piece of code - oh, this is beautiful, clean and clear, bugfree, this surely must have been written vim OR emacs?

Or maybe, just maybe, you're just making shit up on the spot and thinking backwards and attributing software quality metrics and outcomes to choice of a fucking text editor and how riced it is.

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I'm not making shit up on the spot nor am I attributing any metrics to vim or emacs specifically or how riced should they be, I'm simply telling you the facts to counter-argue your point of: "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will".

Most software is not written using "some" text editor, I would love to see maniacs writing kernel patches in notepad.exe or nano. Tools are tools - disputing that vim or emacs are not great tools is plainly dumb, obviously there must be something about them for why they've remained a popular choice among highly skilled pros for decades.

Of course, simply picking up a tool isn't enough - I can perfectly write shitty code equally well in Emacs, InteliJ or VSCode, yet saying good stuff never ever got done there is just disingenuous - it was, it is, and it will be. Of course, ricing the editor and terminal doesn't guarantee amazing shit, but the opposite is also equally true - you can't magically build some awesome sauce by paying for proprietary, sophisticated IDE that "just works" either.

> facts to counter-argue your point of: "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will".

Your line of reasoning is something akin to - there are some skilled programmers that have shipped high quality software and wrote the code using lubed mechanical switches.

Therefore there MUST be something about lubing your switches and obsessing over clacks and thocks that contributes to quality of software somehow.

It's some weird bizzaro cargo cult reasoning.

Unix/webdevs often tend to use vim/emacs -> therefore this absolutely must contribute to the quality of software somehow (it has to!)

Except there are absolutely no basis for this claim, as there are high quality software that is written using neither vim nor emacs nor lubed mechanical switches.

> > facts to counter-argue your point of: "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will".

> Your line of reasoning is something akin to - there are some skilled programmers that have shipped high quality software and wrote the code using lubed mechanical switches.

No, I can second that the claim of "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form" has been pretty solidly invalidated by GP. You may be able to claim many other things, and some of them might be true, but that point above won't be.

> has been pretty solidly invalidated by GP

How exactly has it been invalidated?

By pointing out that SOME widely used software (mostly web/web infra with unix heritage) has been written using vim/emacs as the text editor?

Now, you can find endless sea of garbage software on github that is written using riced vim/emacs setups - would you therefore conclude that using vim/emacs leads to garbage software?

The only thing you can conclude here is that to write software (either good or bad) you generally speaking need a keyboard and a text editor.

Claiming vim/emacs leads to or directly contributes to "quality software" is the same and about as meaningful as saying that keyboards and text editors lead to "quality software".

Cargo cult insanity.

> would you therefore conclude that using vim/emacs leads to garbage software?

I cannot conclude that "it leads to garbage software", but I can definitely conclude that "it has ever led to garbage software" at least once, and in some "shape or form".

> Claiming vim/emacs leads to or directly contributes to "quality software" is the same

This (or the alluded opposite) was not the original claim. The original claim was the total impossibility of vim/emacs to have ever led to quality software, in any shape or form. That is the only claim being contested here.

Don't tell me what the original claim was.

You contorted it to mean that it's literally impossible to write "quality software" in vim/emacs.

I did NOT claim this. Nobody would claim this either.

I wouldn't make such claim even about nano or notepad or any text editor (of which there and hundreds and thousands) for that matter.

What an insane thing to contest even.

Would I attribute quality of software to - in any shape or form - to the text editor it was written in - whether written in nano, notepad or vim or emacs or god knows what else? No, I would not. That WAS the original claim.

> I did NOT claim this. Nobody would claim this either.

Regardless of what you wanted to convey, I hope the responses make a bit more sense now.

> What an insane thing to contest even.

We just simply thought so too.

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