SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 135 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
-- Tom Robbins
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:09AM (7 children)
What's elegant about a mouse? The keyboard allows communication through language, where you can express yourself with eloquence, rather than caveman-style point and click and drag. The mouse is inferior in form, function, and utility.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by G-forze on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:30AM (1 child)
You have a strange concept of language. No CLI I've ever used has understood any of the actual languages I speak and read/write, but rather has to be fed a very exact series of nonsensical-unless-you-already-know-them character combinations. That requires a huge amount of learning before being efficient to use, whereas a well designed GUI can be used (fairly) efficiently from the get-go, without actually having to memorize or look up any specific commands.
If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:12PM
Et tu.
"No CLI I've ever used has understood any of the actual languages I speak and read/write"
Wow. Just wow.
So you think that if it doesn't parse natural language flawlessly (an impossible task as you should realize if you'd think about it for a few seconds) it's not language? THAT is a really strange concept of language indeed!
We humans use specialized language all the time, in every walk of life, for all kinds of reasons. Language is a tool which is made to fit the task at hand. "Strike" means something totally different in a martial arts studio to what it means at a union meeting. Every profession has it's own language, and this is not entirely about confusing outsiders (though that's generally seen as a positive side effect) but because it's actually necessary in order to do the job! So when you learn to do anything useful at all, you also learn a new language, in a sense. It's all still English (or whatever your native tongue might be) though, they aren't actually different languages in the usual sense of the word, just specialized types of English.
So I have to say EVERY CLI I've ever used (even in foreign countries!) has in fact understood my native tongue, which is English. Every programming language I have ever seen is a specialized version of English.
You might compare them to legalese, or engineering jargon; but in one way they are MUCH easier to learn than anything like that. Precisely because they are finite, defined languages in a way that no language used for spoken, face to face communication can ever be. There's no body language, there's no hmmm or umm, there's no nervous chatter. Each word is precisely, mathematically defined, and each one is used for affect.
"That requires a huge amount of learning before being efficient to use, "
A huge amount in comparison to what? In any pertinent comparison I can think of at the moment, it seems quite small.
"whereas a well designed GUI can be used (fairly) efficiently from the get-go, "
Only for a narrow range of carefully chosen (and prepared for) tasks.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:29AM (4 children)
Why ask that? It's simple, intuitive, and powerful in what it does.
Only if you can express yourself eloquently with that language through the keyboard. If you can't, well, there you go.
Except when it isn't, of course. As tools computer mice and keyboards do different jobs.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Arik on Thursday August 23 2018, @02:57PM (3 children)
It's none of that. Simple? You have a very imprecise and indirect linkage to move a 'pointer' around a virtual space composed of pixels smaller than you can see, and a couple of buttons to 'activate' the selected pixel in different ways. In a way that is 'simpler' than having 100 odd entrypoints, but you can't actually make a system simpler that way - when you reduce the entrypoints you make the pathways longer to compensate, generally speaking. The complexity inherent in the system cannot really be avoided (save via brute dumbing down - removing functions or making them entirely inaccessible) it can only be moved around.
So your entry point with a mouse-driven system essentially gives you only two values at each stage - the (imprecise) location of the pointer as a pixel and which button was pushed. Then you either have an immediate selection or activation event or you activate a menu which has to be navigated by a series of subsequent events (menu selections) before ultimately generating another event. This can and does get very complex.
Intuitive? Far, far from intuitive. Anyone who's watched people that were not already familiar with these things pick them up and try to use them for the first time would fall down laughing at your description. The only intuitive interface is the nipple - everything else has to be learned.
Powerful? I'm sure in some sense, ultimately you can use it to direct the power of the pc, that's the only power it has. For the vast majority of tasks, you can direct that power far more elegantly and efficiently using a real input device, and for many things that's the only practical option.
"Except when it isn't, of course. As tools computer mice and keyboards do different jobs."
This is true.
The keyboard is a fully capable general interface device for a personal computer. It is capable of fully replacing the toggle switches and punch cards that it replaced.
The mouse replaced nothing, and is capable of replacing nothing. The mouse is a pointing device. It's not the best pointing device but it is the least expensive and most popular pointing device. It let's you fingerpaint and poke things. It's a tool for selling PCs to people that don't need them and can't use them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 24 2018, @04:19AM (2 children)
What's the problem with that? And why is it supposed to be relevant?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @02:46PM (1 child)
Programmers and engineers value precision.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 25 2018, @01:47AM