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The problem is that most people love their tools more than they love to build things.

“You’ll have to pry vim from my cold, dead hands!”




These two things don’t necessarily have to be conflated.

I rarely touch my vim config but at the same time during development, I write mini-programs (using macros, reflexes and buffer operations) in vim on the fly, that can write code for me or perform refactor stuff in ways that IDEs can’t typically do. I spend little to no time updating my vim tooling.


Jack is looking towards the inevitable paradigm shift away from a primarily text-based programming to whatever the future may hold. It's to be expected that most people will say they are perfectly productive with how things are thank you very much.


Yeah, well, "whatever the future may hold" isn't enough to get people to switch. I'm at least somewhat productive with how things are. You want me to switch? Show me how to be more productive with something that is concretely available today. You have something that may be revolutionary sometime in the future? Then I'll care sometime in the future, if it turns out to be actually revolutionary.

I can't be productive on vaporware and dreams.


I'll be happy to use a better paradigm than text when someone comes up with one. In the meantime, all the attempts to replace programs-as-text have failed to result in any actual improvement, save for niches like e.g. StarLogo that cater to beginners.


I'm sure it's inevitable, but I'd like to point out it's been inevitable for at least 50 years.


I started using vi in 1989. I still use vi, almost every day. I've had to learn my way around I don't know how many text editors, IDEs and so forth over time, often to throw that away when the new thing comes out. Not so with vi - most of what I was doing in 1989 in vi I am still doing in vi.




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