richardk

Experience has taught me this:

Never build your self-esteem on comparison with another

And by that I mean, you should never judge your own programming abilities based on other peoples' apparent abilities. If you're programming new stuff regularly, enjoying it and listening to what other programmers have to say, then the chances are you're getting better at it, and that's enough.

I've heard that "A Book on C" is supposed to be a much better book for learning C

Am I really supposed to believe that my time is better spent learning an editor than it is spent getting better at programming?

I honestly feel that learning these editors has more to do with gaining status than it does self-improvement.

Why should I have to spend hours consciously learning an /editor/. It's /just/ an editor, the interface should be good enough that I can just walk in and use it productively from the start.

For the record, I used vim for the first 2 years of my degree, now I use gedit. It certainly lacks some functionality, but it's generally good enough and feels like much less of a burden to carry: I'm free to focus on actual work.

"Farewell to MIT" just seemed like such great advice, I was surprised when I found it hadn't already been posted here.

whilst i certainly agree with this, i would speculate that 80-90% of the average user's time is spent carrying out a handful of simple operations that are better catered for by guis. for the other 10-20% we have our virtually infinite space: the shell.

imo, we should be thinking about the task we are working on, not the interface we are using to accomplish our task, so the best interface is the one we don't even notice.

i used to use the command line for everything but recently switched to using guis.

switched mainly because gui applications seem nicer to me for completing common desktop tasks, for example listening to music, i can just click the rhythmbox applet and select a song as opposed to something like "mplayer ~/Music/some\ artist/some\ album/*" or manipulating files, it seems a lot nicer to me to be able to pull a file onto my desktop than type out (even with tab-complete) "mv foo ~/Desktop". ofcourse, there are exceptions when using a shell is much easier, for instance if i want to copy a large number of files whose filenames have some similar pattern.

it's also very nice to be able to install some new program and just use it, why should i have to read long poorly written man pages?

at the same time i still use a shell everyday, but as a programming/administration tool.

but other than that, yeah... kinda redundant.

lol