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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."
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A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages
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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(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