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I wonder if the set of folks discussing here is completely different from the set of folks that saw Notch (Minecraft creator) coding on the weekend. Everyone se

• thequux 15y ago
  Eclipse is not fundamentally less productive than vim; it's just productive along a different axis. Eclipse can sling around Java syntax like no other, but it's no better than notepad at editing text. On the other hand, vim has a very cursory understanding of Java syntax (as in, it knows that "for" is a keyword and "{" starts an indented block; i.e., just what is necessary for syntax highlighting and indenting). As a result, eclipse is really good at moving around your source, which is important when editing large software. Vim, on the other hand, is more of a tactical editor; it lets you compose a small set of primitives into a incantation that will rearrange arguments in a function call, and then compose that with the repetition primitives to do basic refactoring. The effect is the same, but the way you go about it is very different.
  • swah 15y ago
    And hopefully you train to make those in a way that no syntax errors are generated...