7 ms·

It's really not that painful. In college I spent two weeks forcing myself to use emacs for everything. I printed out a reference card and unplugged my mouse to

by necubi 6y ago

It's really not that painful. In college I spent two weeks forcing myself to use emacs for everything. I printed out a reference card and unplugged my mouse to prevent cheating. It was not a productive two weeks, but afterwards I was proficient in emacs editing and have been ever since. (Of course true emacs mastery goes much deeper, but it really doesn't take that long to become proficient.)

quanticle 6y ago
A broke college student with nothing to lose but time and a professional programmer have entirely two different definitions of "painful". A broke college student will spend two weeks learning emacs to avoid paying for a $100 IDE. A professional developer will happily pay for a $100 IDE if it saves him two weeks of time.
- antepodius 6y ago
  In this case, it isn't about money, but proficiency.
  - quanticle 6y ago
    Proficiency? Proficiency in what? Proficiency in learning a completely irrelevant language to spend two months getting up to the same level everyone else gets to in two weeks?
    - antepodius 6y ago
      Slower to learn, but with a higher cap, and more likely to endure for four more decades than a given learn-in-two-weeks gui program.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  It's an investment and the payback is considerable. I can start up emacs in any environment and it works the same. I could go back 20 years and use emacs without trouble. Also I can move around in emacs and do stuff with macros that has saved me a lot of time. And emacs rarely has problems, unlike visual studio, which crashes occasionally and is permanently sending my dual-core to 100% of both. Emacs refactoring, heh, not so good... So I use both, do main editing in emacs.
  - quanticle 6y ago
    But you're not going to go back 20 years. No one's going to come along with a time machine and send you back to the year 2000. And, unlike vi, emacs isn't part of the POSIX standard, so your production servers aren't going to have emacs preinstalled. If you're a new programmer, with zero experience, why would you bother learning a program that is going to make you less productive than your peers and isn't going to give you any advantages when you're debugging in production? What exactly is the payoff to this "investment"?

by necubi 6y ago

quanticle 6y ago

A broke college student with nothing to lose but time and a professional programmer have entirely two different definitions of "painful". A broke college student will spend two weeks learning emacs to avoid paying for a $100 IDE. A professional developer will happily pay for a $100 IDE if it saves him two weeks of time.

antepodius 6y ago
In this case, it isn't about money, but proficiency.
- quanticle 6y ago
  Proficiency? Proficiency in what? Proficiency in learning a completely irrelevant language to spend two months getting up to the same level everyone else gets to in two weeks?
  - antepodius 6y ago
    Slower to learn, but with a higher cap, and more likely to endure for four more decades than a given learn-in-two-weeks gui program.
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
It's an investment and the payback is considerable. I can start up emacs in any environment and it works the same. I could go back 20 years and use emacs without trouble. Also I can move around in emacs and do stuff with macros that has saved me a lot of time. And emacs rarely has problems, unlike visual studio, which crashes occasionally and is permanently sending my dual-core to 100% of both. Emacs refactoring, heh, not so good... So I use both, do main editing in emacs.
- quanticle 6y ago
  But you're not going to go back 20 years. No one's going to come along with a time machine and send you back to the year 2000. And, unlike vi, emacs isn't part of the POSIX standard, so your production servers aren't going to have emacs preinstalled. If you're a new programmer, with zero experience, why would you bother learning a program that is going to make you less productive than your peers and isn't going to give you any advantages when you're debugging in production? What exactly is the payoff to this "investment"?