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Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with. This is not politics, this is simply da

by preek 10y ago

Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with. This is not politics, this is simply dangerous and I do feel that way every time I see someone with a copy of Sublime. Since I'm a lecturer, I see this issue of lock-in and easy vs. simple/powerful a lot. I'm not taking this lightly, I want the best for my fellow professionals that are just too young to know better. You personally, might be older and more experienced, and I do not have a grudge with your opinion. I was simply stating mine for the reasons given without trying to step on your foot. As for simplicity, there is nothing that I have seen in any editor that is simpler than VIM modal editing or a LISP-machine to do everything. Having a shiny GUI is inherently not simple, but complex. If you are not familiar with yhe original meanings of these terms, there's a qualified speaker: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy That a tool is not easy in the beginning is ultimately irrelevant if it is simple. That is, if you've got enough time to master and profit from it. Which is what every professional software engineer has.

CJefferson 10y ago
VIM's modal editing isn't remotely simple. There is a huge language to learn, and most keys do not form useful patterns which are easy to remember. The problem with "you need to invest the time, trust me", I'd the same argument can be used for vim, Emacs, sublime, atom, vscode, eclipse, intellij, and any other editor. I can't invest the time in all of them to become expert. The difference with Emacs and vim is that they require a sizable time investment just to become competent, as they refuse to fit into the OSes they are running in (in the case of windows and Mac).
- preek 10y ago
  Well, to make a long story and potential flame war short: My original post was not about VIM or Emacs. It was stating happiness about an editor (Lime) that tries to be easy to get started, yet is open source.
- krylon 10y ago
  > VIM's modal editing isn't remotely simple. While it is highly non-intuitive at first, one can learn the basics in a day or two, from then on it's mostly transferring what you learn to muscle memory. I suppose one can do more advanced stuff in vim that is more complex to learn, but the basics are pretty easy. (Full disclosure: I used to to use vim for a couple of years but switched to emacs about ten years ago. I still use vi for quickly editing a config file on a regular basis.)
audunw 10y ago
> Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with. This is not politics, this is simply dangerous and I do feel that way every time I see someone with a copy of Sublime. This is just wild exaggeration. It doesn't take more than a few weeks or so to become reasonably productive with another text editor. We like to think that the many plugins and shortcuts we build up over years of using an editor adds like 100% speed increases, while at best its increments of a few fractions of a percent. And most of us developers are probably familiar with at least two editors anyway. Personally I'm intimately familiar and productive with both emacs and sublime, but still prefer sublime. If sublime were to suddenly close down shop and not release their sources, I could switch on a dime. > As for simplicity, there is nothing that I have seen in any editor that is simpler than VIM modal editing or a LISP-machine to do everything. In theory, yes. In practice, I've found it much more complex to work with emacs plugins than with Sublime plugins. My conclusion is that overly simple languages like LISP just transfer complexity from the language itself to the code that you're writing. I'm sure some people find a kind of simplicity there that they like, but people are different. VIM modal editing is also a thing that may be nice to some people, but personally I find modes to be annoying. It's this state that I always have to keep in sync between me and the editor, and I don't like it. I get the point and the benefits, and I've tried several times, but it just doesn't click for me. So I don't experience that as a simplicity. > Having a shiny GUI is inherently not simple, but complex. I wouldn't call Sublimes GUI shiny. In fact it's quite minimalistic. Even more so than Emacs' GUI if you ask me, especially once you've added all the plugins to match functionality. Again, it's something about the transfer of complexity. In theory, in its base implementation, Emacs is simpler because it makes few assumptions. But this transfers a lot of complexity to plug-in writers, because you get conventions instead, which often causes problems when plug-ins interact.
- ue_ 10y ago
  >My conclusion is that overly simple languages like LISP just transfer complexity from the language itself to the code that you're writing. Can you give some examples please? Python is even simpler than CL however I don't regard it to be transferring any complexity to the programmer.
oblio 10y ago
> As for simplicity, there is nothing that I have seen in any editor that is simpler than VIM modal editing or a LISP-machine to do everything. Having a shiny GUI is inherently not simple, but complex. I'm a Vim user. But it's exactly this kind of thing that pushes newbies away. Yes, Vim is "simple" conceptually. But in this real world we live in, Vim often makes things more complicated. It's one more thing to learn - and a weird one. On top of that, Vim's architecture is ancient and not everything has aged gracefully.
- preek 10y ago
  I concur. That's why the only good thing that I said about VIM is the modal editing which is the most pleasing and efficient mode of editing text that I have ever seen. However, all your points are very correct! That is why I have switched to Emacs where I can still have full VIM modal editing with the other issues you mentioned not being an issue. Emacs has a mode called 'evil' which fully emulates VIM. Best of both worlds^^
falcolas 10y ago
> Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with You say that as if Sublime HQ Pty Ltd were to suddenly go out of business, the editor is immediately and completely useless. This is obviously not the case, in any way, shape or form. It could go out of business tomorrow, and Sublime Text would be perfectly usable (and extensible) until the OSes changed in a way which stopped it from working. Being open source provides no more guarantee of future development than being closed source does.
Karunamon 10y ago
That's just it - I've done nothing of the sort. Sublime has no "unique" features that don't have equivalents in form and function on other editors. So this "lock in" simply does not exist in the case of Sublime. That naturally leads to the question of "Why it, and not a free alternative?" I said it elsewhere in this thread, but the main reason I'm on Sublime and not Atom or an equivalent competitor is speed. It's fast, it's developed conservatively, and watching other editors hitch and stutter when they open large files or scrolling or start up or process syntax highlighting probably doesn't have much time impact on my productivity, it does cause a great deal of annoyance, hence stress, which probably does impact productivity in some way. The other reason is that it lacks in bloat, which to me, means it lacks a ton of features I will never use, something I cannot say about Vim (macros, registers, hundreds of ancillary commands) or Emacs (an entire Lisp vm) and their associated complexity. However, it can be trivially extended with Python, which means any functionality it lacks has likely been worked around by someone in the community. On top of all that, the author has made indication that he'd rather see the editor go open source than be abandoned[1], but I don't share the common belief that no updates for years means "abandoned" either. [1] https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/whats-happening/139/9 https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/whats-happening/139/9

by preek 10y ago

CJefferson 10y ago

VIM's modal editing isn't remotely simple. There is a huge language to learn, and most keys do not form useful patterns which are easy to remember. The problem with "you need to invest the time, trust me", I'd the same argument can be used for vim, Emacs, sublime, atom, vscode, eclipse, intellij, and any other editor. I can't invest the time in all of them to become expert. The difference with Emacs and vim is that they require a sizable time investment just to become competent, as they refuse to fit into the OSes they are running in (in the case of windows and Mac).

preek 10y ago
Well, to make a long story and potential flame war short: My original post was not about VIM or Emacs. It was stating happiness about an editor (Lime) that tries to be easy to get started, yet is open source.
krylon 10y ago
> VIM's modal editing isn't remotely simple. While it is highly non-intuitive at first, one can learn the basics in a day or two, from then on it's mostly transferring what you learn to muscle memory. I suppose one can do more advanced stuff in vim that is more complex to learn, but the basics are pretty easy. (Full disclosure: I used to to use vim for a couple of years but switched to emacs about ten years ago. I still use vi for quickly editing a config file on a regular basis.)

audunw 10y ago

> Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with. This is not politics, this is simply dangerous and I do feel that way every time I see someone with a copy of Sublime. This is just wild exaggeration. It doesn't take more than a few weeks or so to become reasonably productive with another text editor. We like to think that the many plugins and shortcuts we build up over years of using an editor adds like 100% speed increases, while at best its increments of a few fractions of a percent. And most of us developers are probably familiar with at least two editors anyway. Personally I'm intimately familiar and productive with both emacs and sublime, but still prefer sublime. If sublime were to suddenly close down shop and not release their sources, I could switch on a dime. > As for simplicity, there is nothing that I have seen in any editor that is simpler than VIM modal editing or a LISP-machine to do everything. In theory, yes. In practice, I've found it much more complex to work with emacs plugins than with Sublime plugins. My conclusion is that overly simple languages like LISP just transfer complexity from the language itself to the code that you're writing. I'm sure some people find a kind of simplicity there that they like, but people are different. VIM modal editing is also a thing that may be nice to some people, but personally I find modes to be annoying. It's this state that I always have to keep in sync between me and the editor, and I don't like it. I get the point and the benefits, and I've tried several times, but it just doesn't click for me. So I don't experience that as a simplicity. > Having a shiny GUI is inherently not simple, but complex. I wouldn't call Sublimes GUI shiny. In fact it's quite minimalistic. Even more so than Emacs' GUI if you ask me, especially once you've added all the plugins to match functionality. Again, it's something about the transfer of complexity. In theory, in its base implementation, Emacs is simpler because it makes few assumptions. But this transfers a lot of complexity to plug-in writers, because you get conventions instead, which often causes problems when plug-ins interact.

ue_ 10y ago
>My conclusion is that overly simple languages like LISP just transfer complexity from the language itself to the code that you're writing. Can you give some examples please? Python is even simpler than CL however I don't regard it to be transferring any complexity to the programmer.

oblio 10y ago

> As for simplicity, there is nothing that I have seen in any editor that is simpler than VIM modal editing or a LISP-machine to do everything. Having a shiny GUI is inherently not simple, but complex. I'm a Vim user. But it's exactly this kind of thing that pushes newbies away. Yes, Vim is "simple" conceptually. But in this real world we live in, Vim often makes things more complicated. It's one more thing to learn - and a weird one. On top of that, Vim's architecture is ancient and not everything has aged gracefully.

preek 10y ago
I concur. That's why the only good thing that I said about VIM is the modal editing which is the most pleasing and efficient mode of editing text that I have ever seen. However, all your points are very correct! That is why I have switched to Emacs where I can still have full VIM modal editing with the other issues you mentioned not being an issue. Emacs has a mode called 'evil' which fully emulates VIM. Best of both worlds^^

falcolas 10y ago

> Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with You say that as if Sublime HQ Pty Ltd were to suddenly go out of business, the editor is immediately and completely useless. This is obviously not the case, in any way, shape or form. It could go out of business tomorrow, and Sublime Text would be perfectly usable (and extensible) until the OSes changed in a way which stopped it from working. Being open source provides no more guarantee of future development than being closed source does.

Karunamon 10y ago

That's just it - I've done nothing of the sort. Sublime has no "unique" features that don't have equivalents in form and function on other editors. So this "lock in" simply does not exist in the case of Sublime. That naturally leads to the question of "Why it, and not a free alternative?" I said it elsewhere in this thread, but the main reason I'm on Sublime and not Atom or an equivalent competitor is speed. It's fast, it's developed conservatively, and watching other editors hitch and stutter when they open large files or scrolling or start up or process syntax highlighting probably doesn't have much time impact on my productivity, it does cause a great deal of annoyance, hence stress, which probably does impact productivity in some way. The other reason is that it lacks in bloat, which to me, means it lacks a ton of features I will never use, something I cannot say about Vim (macros, registers, hundreds of ancillary commands) or Emacs (an entire Lisp vm) and their associated complexity. However, it can be trivially extended with Python, which means any functionality it lacks has likely been worked around by someone in the community. On top of all that, the author has made indication that he'd rather see the editor go open source than be abandoned[1], but I don't share the common belief that no updates for years means "abandoned" either. [1] https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/whats-happening/139/9 https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/whats-happening/139/9