> particular dated editor I wonder how you feel about age discrimination. Old != bad. I started using Vim when I was 14; I was the only one in the class who w

> particular dated editor I wonder how you feel about age discrimination. Old != bad. I started using Vim when I was 14; I was the only one in the class who wasn't using an IDE. Vim (perhaps combined with a language server if you're okay with the complexity) runs circles around bloated IDEs like IntelliJ/VSCode. Unix combined with a tiling WM is the best IDE in existence. The professor in question is likely doing the students a service by showing them the advantages of minimalism and function-over-form over the trend of bundling an OS with every "app". Many students today only feel comfortable using software that saturates their synapses with colors and animations; having to use Vim for a semester forces the good ones to realize that maybe, just maybe, function should come before form. Maybe 10k lines of C or POSIX shell solves a problem better than a VC-backed Electron app. To continue your analogy, WordPerfect and DOS, unlike Vim, aren't better than today's tools. What would be an improvement is LaTeX/BibTeX for writing essays. Once I realized how much work was automatically done for me--from Chicago-style footnotes/endnotes and auto-generated ToC from headings, the time I spent formatting my papers dropped to zero. I would absolutely incentivize students to use these tools over "modern", bloated word processors.