Over at The New Stack is a brief but entertaining history of the editor vi and Vim.
"The editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore," Joy said. "It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore."
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:22AM (1 child)
Emacs is an ideal user interface for computers that are accessed via an addressable fixed-width character CRT terminal. You could edit a file, and then compile it without having to leave the editor and later reenter it. You could be controlling multiple processes in multiple windows on the screen. All this before mouse-and-windows programming became commonplace.
That's was emacs was good for, and it was *excellent* at doing that. Nowadays, that stuff is still around, but decidedly obsolete. So on today's market, its role has devolved to that of an editor, just one among many others.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Thursday August 23 2018, @10:09AM
Nowadays, that stuff is still around, but decidedly obsolete.
Well, no. There is embedded stuff, you know. Like the ECU in your car - or do you think it runs KDE and Systemd?
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!