Somehow I have never found that essay very convincing. There is something to be said for clean language design and minimal, a non-distracting editing environme

Somehow I have never found that essay very convincing. There is something to be said for clean language design and minimal, a non-distracting editing environment, of course. But the essay doesn't argue the case in any reasoned fashion. It mostly just makes emotional arguments (the talk about training wheels, the example with highlighting fiction, which is over the top). I have worked with large codebases in plain vi and PFE [1] in my wayward youth. It wasn't exactly what I would call a pleasant experience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_File_Editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_File_Editor