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What annoys me about a lot of tech blog posts like this one is that they're essentially voodoo. People like the author write instructions about what you should
by merijnv 16y ago
What annoys me about a lot of tech blog posts like this one is that they're essentially voodoo. People like the author write instructions about what you should do without even understanding the instructions themselves.
"I’m not entirely sure what the filetype lines do. I’ve read that they’re necessary and so far I haven’t had problems."
His example .vimrc has filetype listed twice, which is redundant. This in itself isn't a big deal, but the problem these lines illustrate is.
Sentences like these are the reason for billions of blog posts about setting up an OpenSSL certificate authority all repeating the same example which the documentation explicitly mentions is the wrong way of doing things.
In fact I find that these voodoo instructions often crowd out any actual proper tech guides in the search results, all for the sake of drawing traffic to some blog...
Don't write tech guides if you can't be bothered to do the research and explain to your readers why they should do what you do and what exactly they're doing!
- loewenskind 16y agoI wish this post were closer to the top. Now that knowledge can finally become instantly available, it's biggest enemy is large amounts of misinformation. This is a much more effective strategy than censorship.
- andymorris 16y agoI'm not a vim guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I still don't take what he says at face value. I don't trust ANYTHING I see on the internet just because it's there! Your criticism seems to be due to the belief that, in a world where the only information on the internet could be treated as gospel, that would allow the experts opinion to come through easily. Unfortunately, that sets up the circumstance where the experts get granted much more exposure and trust than they necessarily deserve, and it inevitably gets subverted and abused. I personally prefer the current system - treat all information as suspect until you can verify it. It leaves MUCH less room for exploitation than all of our other "trust by default" mediums. -- Ayjay on Fedang
- merijnv 16y agoOh, I agree that not trusting information on the internet is the sensible default. However, there are plenty of people who will be copying his examples directly without any investigation. Some will probably post the exact same stuff on their own blogs or link to this post. Before you know it this example will drown out any serious search results for "vim filetype", effectively stopping new people from learning how to do things properly. Now obviously this post is a bit hyperbole in this instance. But these things do happen because people can't be arsed to treat the things they write/publish with the care it deserves.
- graywh 16y agoI see a lot of people in #vim (freenode) who have followed some random blog post instructions for configuring vim that we have to correct.
- stevelosh 16y agoActually I remember why I do this now. It's to make Pathogen work. From Pathogen's docs: Note that you need to invoke the pathogen functions before invoking "filetype plugin indent on" if you want it to load ftdetect files. On Debian (and probably other distros), the system vimrc does this early on, so you actually need to "filetype off" before "filetype plugin indent on" to force reloading. So yeah, it's not voodoo, it's not redundant, it has a purpose that I just couldn't remember off the top of my head. I'm not sure how the calls to Pathogen got moved out from between those line -- probably when I was rearranging my vimrc at some point.