5 ms·

It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second, which must be mashed into a shape that fits my tool. I don't think I'll ever

It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second, which must be mashed into a shape that fits my tool. I don't think I'll ever describe myself reaching <X> nibbana, because, well, a hammer is a hammer, an IDE is an IDE, a tool is simply a tool, a means to an end.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
I mean, in mathematics a lot of problems are solved by realizing they can be turned into another tupe of problem that we already know how to solve. If you know a text editor like the back of your hand, why would you learn another tool when you can take a different approach and be even more effective?
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  How many hours am I going to spend making my text editor work with this new problem? How long would it take to learn the new tool sufficiently to be reasonably effective? I always remember a coworker who was determined to use Emacs on our Java codebase. He spent three months trying to get functionality equivalent to 2010 Eclipse (I was one of the IDEA hipsters in the company back then), and failed. Hard. I always thought that in 3 months,n if he'd applied that effort to Eclipse, he'd probably be contributing patches to it.
  - knewter 4y ago
    I have learned a multitude of tools. I have used vim/nvim since 2005. Prior to that, visual studio for a few years as a .net developer. I have sought to incorporate vim wherever I could because my muscle memory demands it for productivity. It's not from a lack of learning tools.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
I find that some people really care about the work and that the tools are just a means to an end. Other people love certain tools so much that "the work" is actually just an excuse to use their favorite tool in more elaborate and challenging ways. Their attitude is something like "and now for my next trick..." The funny part, to me is that I've never been able to see one method as producing better results than another. I've seen work focused folks produce bad output and I've seen tool focused folks get caught up in their tools and never produce anything at all. But I've also seen both types produce masterpieces. Just different approaches and personalities I think.
- plufz 4y ago
  I partly agree that it is a matter of personality, and that both can produce good results. But in my experience junior devs care more about the tools than seniors.
- stitched2gethr 4y ago
  I think a big part of it is just enjoying your time. We're both driving cross country, following the speed limits. We'll both arrive at roughly the same time but maybe I'll enjoy my time more if I'm driving a stick shift. This is in general of course. Me personally, I save tens of minutes a year by using vim.
  - allarm 4y ago
    > I save tens of minutes a year by using vim. Probably more. It’s not only the speed of typing and editing that matters, but also the time you spend on context switching. When your hands don’t leave the home row you don’t leave the current context.
- manmal 4y ago
  Loving one’s tools is one way of loving the process - arguably the best approach to building great things.
doix 4y ago
You use a tool enough and it shapes your way of thinking. It's like touch typing, you don't think about the individual keys you press. Instead you think about what you're trying to say/code and muscle memory takes over. It's the same with vim. You start thinking "delete that word", or change everything until the '(' character. When you start thinking that way, changing the way you think becomes distracting. > It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second, which must be mashed into a shape that fits my tool. I see it more of a question of, do you change the way you think to match the tool? Or change the tool to match the way you think? I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer, at some point I changed the way I think to match the vim model. Now I change things to match the vim model rather than change the way I think.
- minusf 4y ago
  i can't not explain in words what it's like to use vim for 20+ years, esp to someone thinking an editor is "just" a tool. my vim config changes with me... for some the journey is never the goal.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    I've used Vim since 1993, pretty sure it was 93, might have been 92, and it was probably just Vi initially, but then I progressed to Vim. And I still use it. So yeah, guess I haven't hit 20+ years, but I'm pretty damn close, and still not as committed to it as you are. Length of time using it doesn't correlate to passion.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - xanathar 4y ago
      If you started in 1992 you're at 30 years.
      - EdwardDiego 4y ago
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
This sounds like a knee-jerk reaction that results from not having taken the time to make sure that the criticism lines up with the thing being criticised. > It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second The problem is clearly outlined here: "Manipulating raw ipynb files is difficult and unergonomic." OP is not fiddling with his or her editor configuration because of any undue focus/deficiency regarding Neovim. The deficiency is in the Jupyter notebooks editors. In other words... Problem: Jupyter sucks; my thoughts are always slowed down by having to squeeze them through a low-bandwidth link and the ergonomics hurdles that comprise basic text inputs--I want to go fast, but with Jupyter, I can't. Their solution: This.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  And conveniently, the solution is the editor that the author has already invested a lot of time into. What are the odds? PS, describing my comment as knee-jerk is unhelpfully dismissive. I'm always keen to engage, and always happy to acknowledge when I'm wrong. :)
  - myfavoritedog 4y ago
    Conveniently, the solution is the editor that thousands of developers have taken time to improve over decades so that the author didn't have to start from scratch. What are the odds that the solution involved a popular, mature tool that the developer could leverage?
  - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
    To answer your question: > What are the odds? Very good, actually. You seem (and seemed) to be unaware how dismissive your original comment was. In fact that was the entire point of the response. To take issue with that response on the grounds it itself is "unhelpfully dismissive" involves layers of irony.
    - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
      Disregard this, I suck cocks.
jolmg 4y ago
Yesterday, I bought some nuts and wondered if I needed a nutcracker. I kinda dislike specialist tools. I prefer versatile ones. I found that I could just hold it in my hand and hit the nut with the blunt side of a chef's knife, turning the nut around and cracking all sides with precision. I could reliably extract the eatable inside part completely intact, not even split in halves. A specialist nutcracker tool is pointless to me now.
- tpoacher 4y ago
  That's nuts!!!
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  I typically use a hammer. But as the old saying goes, when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nut.
MonkeyClub 4y ago
I have good news for you :) > I don't think I'll ever describe myself reaching <X> nibbana, because, well, a hammer is a hammer, an IDE is an IDE, a tool is simply a tool, a means to an end. According to the Zen master Dogen: “Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Maybe contrast that to Chuang Tzu's Dexterous Butcher... "When I first began To cut up an oxen I would see before me The whole ox All in one mass. After three years I no longer saw this mass. I saw the distinctions. “But now, I see nothing With the eye. My whole being Apprehends. My senses are idle. The spirit Free to work without plan Follows its own instinct Guided by natural line, By the secret opening, the hidden space, My cleaver finds its own way. I cut through no joint, chop no bone." It's not the tool, but the wielder.
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    > It's not the tool, but the wielder. It’s following the tao of the ox. That’s why he didn’t need to sharpen his cleaver for a decade or something, it just “naturally” went into the empty spaces, rather than stumble against bones and sinews. (If I remember correctly; my old Burton Watson copy is now sadly long lost.)
- lukas099 4y ago
  Like a lot of Zen things, this sounds like someone 'trying to sound deep'. But I'll try my best to interpret it charitably and maybe others can chime in with their interpretations. It's safe to say most people see mountains as mountains etc. When you start practicing Zen, you glimpse into the inseparability of things: there is really no defined boundary between the 'atoms of the mountain' and the 'atoms of the water'. (Also the atoms themselves are mostly empty space with a probability distribution of where the 'stuff' 'is'). Things like 'mountains' are really illusory abstractions that humans build on top of the underlying reality of the swirling wave patterns of the universe. 'Existence precedes essence', as the existentialists say. Still in this second phase, you notice things like when you have a conversation with another, the conversation is not really being generated by either brain, it is being generated by the system that includes both brains (and nerves, muscles, vocal cords, the air between them, eardrums, etc.) However, after enlightenment, you realize that the underlying physics is no more 'real' than the abstractions, as the abstractions are what really has an effect on the universe. As Zizek might say, the distortion itself is the real. When I see a mountain, the way that my brain interprets it as a mountain, in effect makes it a mountain, because the symbol itself manifests itself in my thoughts and actions.
allarm 4y ago
> tool first, problems second Because there’s a tool and there are (current and future) problems that can be solved with this tool. It’s an one time investment into a tool and it helps to solve multiple future problems more efficiently. Especially with vim or rather modal editing - this skill can be applied everywhere, including your favorite IDE. Though, it may be unrelated to the problem that OP was solving.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  I've used Vim since I first managed to figure out a way to get a shell on the heavily controlled school Unix network. (Well, it was Vi initially). It was always my editor of choice when SSHing into a box over dodgy dial-up for the very obvious reasons, a few keystrokes could be immensely powerful, and they're easy to transmit. But I've never felt the urge to run Vim bindings in my IDE, or my browser. But for working on a file over SSH? Vim all the way. Different tools for different situations.
xbryanx 4y ago
If you swing a steel head framing hammer for 20 years, and then discover the lighter titanium one, I guarantee it will feel like nirvana. Tools matter.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  I don't disagree that using the right tool for the job is important. In fact, that's kinda what I was going for - don't try to make the problem fit your preferred tool, rather, use the right tool.
- pc86 4y ago
  Except this is more like using a hammer for screws because you've been swinging a hammer for 20 years and don't feel like using a screwdriver.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    That comparison makes no sense. Using a hammer for screws doesn't work at all.
    - pc86 4y ago
      And using vim for Jupyter notebooks doesn't either. That's the point of this entire subthread.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        Did you read the blog post? Clearly vim does work. Or are you saying the blog post is a hoax?
- anamexis 4y ago
  Isn't the weight of a hammer head a key part of what makes it effective?
  - 0xEFF 4y ago
kovac 4y ago
> It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second What made you think that their devotion to the tool indicates that they care less about the problem? I wonder what you might think about me then in that I have vim integrated with mutt for composing emails, git, my password manager, code editor, text pager, etc land me in vim. I choose most my apps so that I can use vim for text editing. It gives me uniformity. It saves me time. More importantly, I do not get a negative reaction from people that use different text editors for different text editing tasks looking for buttons to click, shortcuts to press in different places. Especially nowadays, when tech is converging, getting locked down, and we are being told what and how to do things by a few companies, we must appreciate and encourage diversity of tools (except for emacs obviously:) that empower their users. Not be dismissive and judge them for using a tool that we don't use. It's okay for people to master tools they find valuable, and use that mastery to do good things even if they're off-road tools (by today's standards) such as vim.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
I find it fascinating that people think that optimizing a tool doesn't matter when they will be spending over 50% of their actual productive professional time in that tool. At least.
tasuki 4y ago
This person's tools were not working exactly as they wanted. Now their tools work as they want and they're excited about that and wanted to share. It's possible I missed something, but I didn't see the author being devoted to tools first, nor mashing problems to fit their tools.
osigurdson 4y ago
It is good to have at least a basic understanding of a common terminal based editor. Otherwise it is very cumbersome to work with files on a remote server / ssh.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

I mean, in mathematics a lot of problems are solved by realizing they can be turned into another tupe of problem that we already know how to solve. If you know a text editor like the back of your hand, why would you learn another tool when you can take a different approach and be even more effective?

EdwardDiego 4y ago
How many hours am I going to spend making my text editor work with this new problem? How long would it take to learn the new tool sufficiently to be reasonably effective? I always remember a coworker who was determined to use Emacs on our Java codebase. He spent three months trying to get functionality equivalent to 2010 Eclipse (I was one of the IDEA hipsters in the company back then), and failed. Hard. I always thought that in 3 months,n if he'd applied that effort to Eclipse, he'd probably be contributing patches to it.
- knewter 4y ago
  I have learned a multitude of tools. I have used vim/nvim since 2005. Prior to that, visual studio for a few years as a .net developer. I have sought to incorporate vim wherever I could because my muscle memory demands it for productivity. It's not from a lack of learning tools.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

I find that some people really care about the work and that the tools are just a means to an end. Other people love certain tools so much that "the work" is actually just an excuse to use their favorite tool in more elaborate and challenging ways. Their attitude is something like "and now for my next trick..." The funny part, to me is that I've never been able to see one method as producing better results than another. I've seen work focused folks produce bad output and I've seen tool focused folks get caught up in their tools and never produce anything at all. But I've also seen both types produce masterpieces. Just different approaches and personalities I think.

plufz 4y ago
I partly agree that it is a matter of personality, and that both can produce good results. But in my experience junior devs care more about the tools than seniors.
stitched2gethr 4y ago
I think a big part of it is just enjoying your time. We're both driving cross country, following the speed limits. We'll both arrive at roughly the same time but maybe I'll enjoy my time more if I'm driving a stick shift. This is in general of course. Me personally, I save tens of minutes a year by using vim.
- allarm 4y ago
  > I save tens of minutes a year by using vim. Probably more. It’s not only the speed of typing and editing that matters, but also the time you spend on context switching. When your hands don’t leave the home row you don’t leave the current context.
manmal 4y ago
Loving one’s tools is one way of loving the process - arguably the best approach to building great things.

doix 4y ago

You use a tool enough and it shapes your way of thinking. It's like touch typing, you don't think about the individual keys you press. Instead you think about what you're trying to say/code and muscle memory takes over. It's the same with vim. You start thinking "delete that word", or change everything until the '(' character. When you start thinking that way, changing the way you think becomes distracting. > It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second, which must be mashed into a shape that fits my tool. I see it more of a question of, do you change the way you think to match the tool? Or change the tool to match the way you think? I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer, at some point I changed the way I think to match the vim model. Now I change things to match the vim model rather than change the way I think.

minusf 4y ago
i can't not explain in words what it's like to use vim for 20+ years, esp to someone thinking an editor is "just" a tool. my vim config changes with me... for some the journey is never the goal.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  I've used Vim since 1993, pretty sure it was 93, might have been 92, and it was probably just Vi initially, but then I progressed to Vim. And I still use it. So yeah, guess I haven't hit 20+ years, but I'm pretty damn close, and still not as committed to it as you are. Length of time using it doesn't correlate to passion.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - xanathar 4y ago
    If you started in 1992 you're at 30 years.
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

This sounds like a knee-jerk reaction that results from not having taken the time to make sure that the criticism lines up with the thing being criticised. > It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second The problem is clearly outlined here: "Manipulating raw ipynb files is difficult and unergonomic." OP is not fiddling with his or her editor configuration because of any undue focus/deficiency regarding Neovim. The deficiency is in the Jupyter notebooks editors. In other words... Problem: Jupyter sucks; my thoughts are always slowed down by having to squeeze them through a low-bandwidth link and the ergonomics hurdles that comprise basic text inputs--I want to go fast, but with Jupyter, I can't. Their solution: This.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
And conveniently, the solution is the editor that the author has already invested a lot of time into. What are the odds? PS, describing my comment as knee-jerk is unhelpfully dismissive. I'm always keen to engage, and always happy to acknowledge when I'm wrong. :)
- myfavoritedog 4y ago
  Conveniently, the solution is the editor that thousands of developers have taken time to improve over decades so that the author didn't have to start from scratch. What are the odds that the solution involved a popular, mature tool that the developer could leverage?
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  To answer your question: > What are the odds? Very good, actually. You seem (and seemed) to be unaware how dismissive your original comment was. In fact that was the entire point of the response. To take issue with that response on the grounds it itself is "unhelpfully dismissive" involves layers of irony.
  - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
    Disregard this, I suck cocks.

jolmg 4y ago

Yesterday, I bought some nuts and wondered if I needed a nutcracker. I kinda dislike specialist tools. I prefer versatile ones. I found that I could just hold it in my hand and hit the nut with the blunt side of a chef's knife, turning the nut around and cracking all sides with precision. I could reliably extract the eatable inside part completely intact, not even split in halves. A specialist nutcracker tool is pointless to me now.

tpoacher 4y ago
That's nuts!!!
EdwardDiego 4y ago
I typically use a hammer. But as the old saying goes, when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nut.

MonkeyClub 4y ago

I have good news for you :) > I don't think I'll ever describe myself reaching <X> nibbana, because, well, a hammer is a hammer, an IDE is an IDE, a tool is simply a tool, a means to an end. According to the Zen master Dogen: “Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”

EdwardDiego 4y ago
Maybe contrast that to Chuang Tzu's Dexterous Butcher... "When I first began To cut up an oxen I would see before me The whole ox All in one mass. After three years I no longer saw this mass. I saw the distinctions. “But now, I see nothing With the eye. My whole being Apprehends. My senses are idle. The spirit Free to work without plan Follows its own instinct Guided by natural line, By the secret opening, the hidden space, My cleaver finds its own way. I cut through no joint, chop no bone." It's not the tool, but the wielder.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > It's not the tool, but the wielder. It’s following the tao of the ox. That’s why he didn’t need to sharpen his cleaver for a decade or something, it just “naturally” went into the empty spaces, rather than stumble against bones and sinews. (If I remember correctly; my old Burton Watson copy is now sadly long lost.)
lukas099 4y ago
Like a lot of Zen things, this sounds like someone 'trying to sound deep'. But I'll try my best to interpret it charitably and maybe others can chime in with their interpretations. It's safe to say most people see mountains as mountains etc. When you start practicing Zen, you glimpse into the inseparability of things: there is really no defined boundary between the 'atoms of the mountain' and the 'atoms of the water'. (Also the atoms themselves are mostly empty space with a probability distribution of where the 'stuff' 'is'). Things like 'mountains' are really illusory abstractions that humans build on top of the underlying reality of the swirling wave patterns of the universe. 'Existence precedes essence', as the existentialists say. Still in this second phase, you notice things like when you have a conversation with another, the conversation is not really being generated by either brain, it is being generated by the system that includes both brains (and nerves, muscles, vocal cords, the air between them, eardrums, etc.) However, after enlightenment, you realize that the underlying physics is no more 'real' than the abstractions, as the abstractions are what really has an effect on the universe. As Zizek might say, the distortion itself is the real. When I see a mountain, the way that my brain interprets it as a mountain, in effect makes it a mountain, because the symbol itself manifests itself in my thoughts and actions.

allarm 4y ago

> tool first, problems second Because there’s a tool and there are (current and future) problems that can be solved with this tool. It’s an one time investment into a tool and it helps to solve multiple future problems more efficiently. Especially with vim or rather modal editing - this skill can be applied everywhere, including your favorite IDE. Though, it may be unrelated to the problem that OP was solving.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
I've used Vim since I first managed to figure out a way to get a shell on the heavily controlled school Unix network. (Well, it was Vi initially). It was always my editor of choice when SSHing into a box over dodgy dial-up for the very obvious reasons, a few keystrokes could be immensely powerful, and they're easy to transmit. But I've never felt the urge to run Vim bindings in my IDE, or my browser. But for working on a file over SSH? Vim all the way. Different tools for different situations.

xbryanx 4y ago

If you swing a steel head framing hammer for 20 years, and then discover the lighter titanium one, I guarantee it will feel like nirvana. Tools matter.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
I don't disagree that using the right tool for the job is important. In fact, that's kinda what I was going for - don't try to make the problem fit your preferred tool, rather, use the right tool.
pc86 4y ago
Except this is more like using a hammer for screws because you've been swinging a hammer for 20 years and don't feel like using a screwdriver.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  That comparison makes no sense. Using a hammer for screws doesn't work at all.
  - pc86 4y ago
    And using vim for Jupyter notebooks doesn't either. That's the point of this entire subthread.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      Did you read the blog post? Clearly vim does work. Or are you saying the blog post is a hoax?
anamexis 4y ago
Isn't the weight of a hammer head a key part of what makes it effective?
- 0xEFF 4y ago

kovac 4y ago

> It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second What made you think that their devotion to the tool indicates that they care less about the problem? I wonder what you might think about me then in that I have vim integrated with mutt for composing emails, git, my password manager, code editor, text pager, etc land me in vim. I choose most my apps so that I can use vim for text editing. It gives me uniformity. It saves me time. More importantly, I do not get a negative reaction from people that use different text editors for different text editing tasks looking for buttons to click, shortcuts to press in different places. Especially nowadays, when tech is converging, getting locked down, and we are being told what and how to do things by a few companies, we must appreciate and encourage diversity of tools (except for emacs obviously:) that empower their users. Not be dismissive and judge them for using a tool that we don't use. It's okay for people to master tools they find valuable, and use that mastery to do good things even if they're off-road tools (by today's standards) such as vim.

asdajksah2123 4y ago

I find it fascinating that people think that optimizing a tool doesn't matter when they will be spending over 50% of their actual productive professional time in that tool. At least.

tasuki 4y ago

This person's tools were not working exactly as they wanted. Now their tools work as they want and they're excited about that and wanted to share. It's possible I missed something, but I didn't see the author being devoted to tools first, nor mashing problems to fit their tools.

osigurdson 4y ago

It is good to have at least a basic understanding of a common terminal based editor. Otherwise it is very cumbersome to work with files on a remote server / ssh.