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Comment by goldfeld | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be an otherwise great guy with insightful comments and writings[1] that I occasionaly see on elsethreads. But as soon as a vim post hits the frontpage here you are to rehash the same authority fallacies, brag about having used and created this and that editor, and claim that what's in discussion here is as good as vi (which wasn't even extensible to begin with.) If you hated the little editor so much during your time being forced to use it, why do you insist on visiting these threads and reliving such horrid memories? I'm not sure who you're trying to save here, the bunch of us seem to be mostly happy with what is really the worst editor we can get except all the others.

[1]: Was really pleased to bump into your article on Examples in Math the other day.

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> ... why do you insist on visiting these threads and reliving such horrid memories?

That's easy to answer -- as astonishing as it may sound, people are still using vim. Some of them might even think it's natural to have to use twice as many keystrokes as are required on a modern editor, even another command-line editor, to switch from editing to navigating (as just one example).

> I'm not sure who you're trying to save here, the bunch of us seem to be mostly happy with what is really the worst editor we can get except all the others.

Yes, except that that is false. Any meaningful comparison is so obviously against vim that I feel like I'm trying to dissuade True Believers from an irrational belief.

Please tell me more about this modern editor where half the keystrokes get the same job done.

Or tell me about any editor where the same amount of keystrokes get the same job done.

I can't drag you kicking and screaming into the early twenty-first century. You have to make that trip on your own.

I give replies like that to my brothers when I'm gaslighting them and they are trying find proof I'm lying.

Please, describe a particular 'job', and the keystrokes to do it in Vim.

On the contrary, you seem to be the "True Believer" refusing to be dissuaded. Is it so hard to believe there might be a degree of personal preference and intuition to a certain approach that one might want to keep using it? Typically, a good engineer prides himself on using The Right Tool For The Job (TM) modulo by an appropriate degree what works well for him. (Especially in something like editor where the choice is all but if not transparent to the end product)

> Typically, a good engineer prides himself on using The Right Tool For The Job ...

Do you also write Fortran? You may or may not be surprised to learn that I have nearly identical debates with diehard Fortran programmers who try to argue that Fortran is anything but a way to support a vast amount of legacy code that no one wants to rewrite (for very good reasons).

Fortran is not the right tool for the job. It once was, but now there are many programs of high economic value that for all intents and purposes cannot be rewritten, for example all the FAA code behind the air traffic control system, as a result of which Fortran will be with us for decades to come.

But no one voluntarily writes new programs in Fortran, at least not if they expect to remain employed. That's true, but try to tell a Fortran programmer this.

Those debates have a lot in common with this one.

My reason for engaging in both debates to to save young programmers from picking up a museum piece without being aware of its legacy status, and thereby crippling themselves and their careers.

As someone who was within recent memory a "young programmer", I find this somewhat of an untrue statement. At the risk of defending my argument with anecdote, VIM was the tool of choice for my entire circle of friends in my undergraduate/graduate, and many of them now sit at MS, Google, and prestigious universities, I would not consider their (or my) careers crippled by this choice, rather facilitated by a tool which has worked well for our needs, and in application (and yes, I have tried other editors) I have not found lacking.

I would not say I "write Fortran" (given that soon to be father in law does, and I would be an embarassment to his competencies) I am familiar with it, and even so would not argue maintaining huge truckloads of legacy code. There does need to be lines for when you "burn it down" or realize that you've been accumulating technical debt that just maintaining compatibility for and of is only contributing to. I would not say that modern vim falls under this category at this point in time.

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