Hacker News Reader

> Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better

I'll just put this here for you:

https://code.google.com/p/vim/source/browse/src/eval.c

Yes that's nearly 25,000 lines of mixed spaces and tab filled pre-C89 C with 492 occurrences of #idef, many appearing in the middle of a function definition. I recently ran vim with debug symbols compiled and it was nice enough to dump a nice 4GB regular expression log file in my project directory. The way to turn that off is to find some ifdefs and comment them out. If vim won then well, I'm not sure what winning means. I've switched to emacs with evil, which in my opinion is better than vim in a lot of ways.

> (Objective-C has had a kind of zombie revival due to iOS, but I don't expect it to last).

Yeah ok, "zombie-revival" sure, your credibility gets a score of 0 here. This isn't an argument, it's a prediction, and a stupid one. Nobody will come back to check your comment in 5 or 10 years and call you out on it. This is just the certain kind of asshat thing you can say and not worry about it coming true or not because you're some anonymous commenter making the internet richer with your irresponsible use of a keyboard.

Making predictions isn't allowed on the internet anymore?

Of course it's allowed. So is judging someone's credibility based on the predictions he chooses to make, whether by the accuracy of said predictions over time, or the plausibility of said predictions in advance of proof's arrival.

Say what you like about Emacs; its source, both in C and in Emacs Lisp, is generally quite readable, and the former I've found to be especially well commented.

> Yes that's nearly 25,000 lines of mixed spaces and tab filled pre-C89 C with 492 occurrences of #idef, many appearing in the middle of a function definition. I recently ran vim with debug symbols compiled and it was nice enough to dump a nice 4GB regular expression log file in my project directory. The way to turn that off is to find some ifdefs and comment them out. If vim won then well, I'm not sure what winning means.

Winning means the user experience, not the code. And sure, I was lazy, it would be more accurate to say vim and emacs won between them (and are still fighting it out).

> Yeah ok, "zombie-revival" sure, your credibility gets a score of 0 here.

Do you disagree that a) Objective-C was more or less dead prior to the release of iOS b) almost all people currently using Objective-C are doing so solely because it's the language you can write iOS apps in c) absent huge, radical changes, Objective-C will never threaten Java's popularity the way that post-Java languages (C#, GHC Haskell (very different from the language that was standardized in 1990), Go, Scala) are?

No Objective-C was not dead before iOS. A thriving Apple was supporting Objective-C in every way possible, and moving from Carbon to Cocoa.

Objective-C is used to build applications for Apple software. It's not a threat to Java, but that doesn't mean Objective-C is dead. Objective-C will be around for a long time to come. It's a modern language that powers all of Apple's most recent technology. They have no reasons to change, and there are no signs that Apple is on the verge of disappearing into the aether.

Vim is shitty software. I like the UI, but the thing is single threaded and everything runs on the UI thread. There's no hope for async, or an event loop, or even a settimeout like feature. The code is full of globals and trying to add new features to the thing is going to result in inexplicable, unfathomable seg faults. Vim uses shitty regular expressions in the UI thread to do syntax highlighting which is why that's slow for big files and why the syntax highlighting breaks.

So the code matters. There will never be powerful IDE like features as long it's this single threaded thing that only ever does anything as a response to user input. Given the state of the code, changing this does not seem ever possible.

> So the code matters. There will never be powerful IDE like features as long it's this single threaded thing that only ever does anything as a response to user input.

Run VIM in a sub-process, and communicate with it through a fake terminal. Basically, quarantine the madness.

> Java did win the war... ...You could argue that Ruby has overtaken it

For what? A specific niche of web applications?

> Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better

Least substantiated claim of 2014 so far.

Haha, but the race is long :)

> Android (which while built of GNU/Linux pieces, is radically different from traditional GNU/Linux - enough to qualify as a different OS IMO, since the API is different).

The "GNU/Linux" vs "Linux" discussion is a long one but I'm pretty sure there's (almost?) no GNU in Android.

There's GNU in android.

I don't think there is. What are you thinking of? All of userland is not GPL licensed, I don;t even think any is LGPL, so I don;t think there is any GNU there.

In fsf writing about it:

  Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system
  because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about
  the only component in common between Android and 
  GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.en.h...

I don't normally say "GNU/Linux", but I felt this was a case where the distinction is particularly important, because Android does run the Linux kernel, but is (IMO) a different OS from GNU/Linux.

Right. The reason I made my comment was because you said "which while built of GNU/Linux pieces" referring to Android, which doesn't make sense.

> Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better.

GNU Emacs is much better. It's easier to use and easier to extend.

>Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better.

Haha, good one. Many of vim's predecessors are better even, nvi is far nicer to use than vim is for example.