Eschew text editors and IDEs. | Hacker News Reader

Eschew text editors and IDEs.

medium.com

25 pointssteveklabnik15 comments

If it wasn't obvious, this post is a troll. Jenn Schiffer is a twisted, brilliant genius.

It wasn't obvious to me. I read the entire thing before the You know what’s cooler than spending $99 on a license of Vim? phrase caught up with me.

Is satire and/or parody or irony amenable to an Information Theory treatment? Those categories of humor have a "low information entropy" feel to them.

I think the quote from "Ashton Kutcher" imploring people to give up text editors is what did it for me (but also that it's Jenn Schiffer!).

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The really funny thing is this is one of her least obvious posts and some people still take the bait every time. I still can't believe that people fell for the stuff about using Node Package Maid over Javascript and deprecating their California Style Sheets.

This ... this is humor, right? I'm not running afoul of Poe's Law? The vim license bit (and what looks like Sublime Text in a screenshot claiming to be vim) seem to be hints. Perhaps even the misuse of "medal" is one too. I want to think this, though.

Taking this seriously: I've used input redirection to write things in dire circumstances a few times, but beyond that, anything that changes that file would be a text editor by definition.

No, Jenn Schiffer is firmly anti-satire:

https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/2412631958ef

That math doesn't add up. Once you choose your editor, you're no longer spending 90% of your time choosing it. (Other tools, sure, but you can't get away from that - any more than you can build a log cabin by chewing the trees down with your teeth.)

This article also assumes that the editor you end up choosing does nothing to increase your productivity. Nobody's going to be able to effectively work on a large Java app in notepad.exe.

Just as "a bad workman (or workwoman) blames his (or her) tools", so "a good workman (or workwoman) praises his (or her) tools". Consequently I spend a good proportion of my time evaluating my tools, my tools being a text editor and a spanner (or wench).

It seems like every week there's a new text editor, and so I schedule regular time to evaluate the newcomer, and compare it against all existing text editors. Simple maths indicates that the amount of time required to compare a new text editor with the growing number of previous text editors expands exponentially. I estimate that by the end of next year I will be spending several months every week evaluating my tools (not including spanners (or wrenches)).

Well, yeah, but if you keep switching, you can get up to 90% of your time spent choosing tools. Can't let your skills get stale.

I don't get the joke. To me the article is just misinformation.

I'm probably missing the grander social commentary.

I am a victim of IDE shaming.

I love the smell of satire in the morning. Especially Fridays.

That's a screenshot of githubs new editor Atom.

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