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> If you think that "VI is a superior editor than Emacs", I'm afraid you still have a shallow understanding of both. Thank you for your long and thoughtful pro

> If you think that "VI is a superior editor than Emacs", I'm afraid you still have a shallow understanding of both. Thank you for your long and thoughtful prose, so fitting for an emacs user. One day, when you value productivity, might I suggest VI.

iLemming 2y ago
> Thank you for your long and thoughtful prose, so fitting for an emacs user. Are you hinting at the fact that I used Emacs to help me write that? Sure I did. Why wouldn't I use Emacs for writing, if all the tools I need are at my fingertips? I have a thesaurus, spellchecking, Google Translate and search, dictionaries, etymology lookup, word counter, Flesch-Kincaid reading ease tester, ChatGPT, Anthropic and other models, dictation, formatter, and many more. Why would anyone ever exposed to that power willingly part with it? > One day, when you value productivity, might I suggest What point of "I'm saying this with confidence of a die-hard vimmer" was unclear? I already use both Emacs and Vim - they serve different purpose for me. And trust, me if YOU value productivity, one day you may wake up with realization - Emacs actually vims better than Vim.
- randmeerkat 2y ago
  iLemming you clearly know how to interwebs, well met.
  - iLemming 2y ago
    Look. In our field of software crafting and Computer Science, conflicting ideas and principles frequently arise, especially when balancing competing concerns. We often need to weigh out performance against readability, abstraction and efficiency, flexibility over simplicity, security vs. usability, consistency over pragmatism, etc. Yet, it's relatively rare for ideas (especially good ones) to become completely invalidated or rendered totally obsolete. Because ideas often retain their value in specific contexts. I already told you my take on the idea of Vim and modality, it's a wonderful, beautiful, powerful, and pragmatic model. Now, Emacs builds on the cornerstone of another incredibly powerful idea - the idea of practical notation for lambda calculus, which is known as Lisp. Lisp probably can be crowned as one of the most important ideas in computer science. It's just hard to think of anything more influential than Lisp. Any programmer who dismisses the idea of Lisp based on one concrete implementation of it is misguided. At some point, after many cycles of frustration, amazement, inspiration and awe you will learn to appreciate certain ideas. I'm not selling you Emacs or Vim here - not one concrete implementation of a concept. I'm just trying to tell you - some ideas are worth learning more, before dismissing them as needless or impractical.
    - randmeerkat 2y ago
      How do you feel about Clojure vs Lisp?
      - iLemming 2y ago
        You mean Clojure vs Common Lisp or Emacs Lisp? In what way? I like them all. They serve different purpose for me, but in general, I like them.
        randmeerkat 2y ago
        How about what’s your go to programming language?
        iLemming 2y ago
        Hmm, I don't really have a "go-to" programming language. Depending on the problem, context, constraints, and team preference, I use whatever. For personal projects, my preference for the past few years invariably has been Lisp dialects. I prefer Clojure-like lightweight PLs - Fennel if I need to deal with a Lua-compatible runtime, Clojurescript for JS-engines. For bash scripting - Babashka. If I need to be close to metal, Common Lisp is great, but it's been a while since I had the need. I've been trying to fix this asynchronous pipeline in nbb that uses Redis and BullMQ, among some other things (for some of them, I'm thinking I may have to brush up on my Python - hopefully, I wouldn't have to), but it's taking longer than desired, been procrastinating with it a lot. Why do you ask? You can't decide what to pick to start with or something?
        randmeerkat 2y ago
        I just always meant to dabble more in a lisp style dialect and was curious what an emacs enthusiast enjoys. Clojure has been mentioned before and I’ve heard good things about Clojurescript. I never heard of Common Lisp for being close to the metal, more so that it was a bit memory heavy in those applications, but I’ll have to take another look. What’s NBB? Python is undeniably a workhorse for most applications and aside from Java probably the easiest to hire for.

iLemming 2y ago

> Thank you for your long and thoughtful prose, so fitting for an emacs user. Are you hinting at the fact that I used Emacs to help me write that? Sure I did. Why wouldn't I use Emacs for writing, if all the tools I need are at my fingertips? I have a thesaurus, spellchecking, Google Translate and search, dictionaries, etymology lookup, word counter, Flesch-Kincaid reading ease tester, ChatGPT, Anthropic and other models, dictation, formatter, and many more. Why would anyone ever exposed to that power willingly part with it? > One day, when you value productivity, might I suggest What point of "I'm saying this with confidence of a die-hard vimmer" was unclear? I already use both Emacs and Vim - they serve different purpose for me. And trust, me if YOU value productivity, one day you may wake up with realization - Emacs actually vims better than Vim.

randmeerkat 2y ago
iLemming you clearly know how to interwebs, well met.
- iLemming 2y ago
  Look. In our field of software crafting and Computer Science, conflicting ideas and principles frequently arise, especially when balancing competing concerns. We often need to weigh out performance against readability, abstraction and efficiency, flexibility over simplicity, security vs. usability, consistency over pragmatism, etc. Yet, it's relatively rare for ideas (especially good ones) to become completely invalidated or rendered totally obsolete. Because ideas often retain their value in specific contexts. I already told you my take on the idea of Vim and modality, it's a wonderful, beautiful, powerful, and pragmatic model. Now, Emacs builds on the cornerstone of another incredibly powerful idea - the idea of practical notation for lambda calculus, which is known as Lisp. Lisp probably can be crowned as one of the most important ideas in computer science. It's just hard to think of anything more influential than Lisp. Any programmer who dismisses the idea of Lisp based on one concrete implementation of it is misguided. At some point, after many cycles of frustration, amazement, inspiration and awe you will learn to appreciate certain ideas. I'm not selling you Emacs or Vim here - not one concrete implementation of a concept. I'm just trying to tell you - some ideas are worth learning more, before dismissing them as needless or impractical.
  - randmeerkat 2y ago
    How do you feel about Clojure vs Lisp?
    - iLemming 2y ago
      You mean Clojure vs Common Lisp or Emacs Lisp? In what way? I like them all. They serve different purpose for me, but in general, I like them.
      - randmeerkat 2y ago
        How about what’s your go to programming language?
        iLemming 2y ago
        Hmm, I don't really have a "go-to" programming language. Depending on the problem, context, constraints, and team preference, I use whatever. For personal projects, my preference for the past few years invariably has been Lisp dialects. I prefer Clojure-like lightweight PLs - Fennel if I need to deal with a Lua-compatible runtime, Clojurescript for JS-engines. For bash scripting - Babashka. If I need to be close to metal, Common Lisp is great, but it's been a while since I had the need. I've been trying to fix this asynchronous pipeline in nbb that uses Redis and BullMQ, among some other things (for some of them, I'm thinking I may have to brush up on my Python - hopefully, I wouldn't have to), but it's taking longer than desired, been procrastinating with it a lot. Why do you ask? You can't decide what to pick to start with or something?
        randmeerkat 2y ago
        I just always meant to dabble more in a lisp style dialect and was curious what an emacs enthusiast enjoys. Clojure has been mentioned before and I’ve heard good things about Clojurescript. I never heard of Common Lisp for being close to the metal, more so that it was a bit memory heavy in those applications, but I’ll have to take another look. What’s NBB? Python is undeniably a workhorse for most applications and aside from Java probably the easiest to hire for.