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posted by chromas on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the :wq dept.

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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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:12PM

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:12PM (#725230) Journal
    "You have a strange concept of language."

    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?
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