All my programming life has been in higher-level languages, yet with Rust I'm being inexplicably drawn to down and dirty systems programming. It's cool to finally be able to use :make and all the C-oriented things like [i and ]i, ctags and the like. It's interesting seeing how much 'dogfooding' vim has in that tons of stuff are undoubtedly geared towards his own needs developing vim (and C applications in general.) Pretty much how I work with coding products, I work my best when I'm the use case, and great open source products like vi/vim and emacs excel in that legions of people share the creator's use case (and well, configurability right down to the bone.) I've found that a non-trivial amount of people do share the use case for the first project I've launched[1], I only hope for it to hold true for my most ambitious ones in the working.

I don't know Bram, but I can't help but wonder why such a distinguished open source figure has ultimately ended up working for Google. Maybe he enjoys the access to resources. I wish donations could still support him directly rather than his idea of aid (well it does seem to have a bend towards education at least). I wish he wouldn't need a day job and could yet breed other new and great contributions to the world. I don't feel particularly endeared towards Google, despite all the collateral good it has done while doing a lot of evil (i.e. something to do with the looming ad empire strengthening big corporations.)

[1]: https://github.com/goldfeld/vim-seek