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 digitalaudiorock on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:19PM
To clarify, I'd always just used the build in vim regex syntax. One thing I love about that :perldo syntax is that you don't have to constantly remember which regex characters need to be escaped, which is really what makes the built in ones confusing in the first place.
Tom