4 ms·

The thing that struck me about his awestruck description of the awfulness of System Z and its editor was "hey, that sounds a lot like vi". I heart my graphical

by seldo 17y ago

The thing that struck me about his awestruck description of the awfulness of System Z and its editor was "hey, that sounds a lot like vi". I heart my graphical IDE.

DannoHung 17y ago
Take a week to learn modal editing and you'll never go back.
- nrr 17y ago
  I am a counterexample to your claim; hence, it is false. I'm very fluent in vi(m), but I still end up going back to Emacs (well, MicroEmacs) every time for anything beyond doing hacks to configuration files. Why? I like having a heavily extensible development environment. I also write Scheme, but that's another thing altogether.
  - gord 17y ago
    It is a minor sadness that Bram didn't choose a lisp as the vim macro language. But I still love vim...although Ive forgotten more bindings than other editors have features.
    - nrr 17y ago
      I'm not actually all that certain I want Lisp as my extension language. Lisp is very, very nice, and while I may have a preference for it, someone else might not. FWIW, MicroEmacs uses an in-house extension language that, while really repulsive to look at at times, gets the job done. That said, I also have a preference for Lua when it comes to more maintream languages, and to boot, there's a project called LuaJIT that performs just-in-time compilation of Lua to native code. There's also MetaLua, which adds the feature of macros to the language. Better still, there's lua-Coat, which is a port of a subset of Moose from Perl (which is, in turn, a port of CLOS and other things to Perl) to Lua. Consider also just using Python or Io or any number of other languages. I guess my point is that it really doesn't depend on the language. If the environment isn't going to be extensible within reason, I probably won't use it. (Did you know that vim lacks the functionality to emulate Emacs' `create-frame`? That's a huge turn-off for me personally.)
- aerique 17y ago
  Editing isn't modal for everyone. I've used vi and Vim for years but I don't use them for more than a quick edit in a file these days.
- lucumo 17y ago
  I did for a year. I went back. Running.
  - gloob 17y ago
    Heh. I'm about the opposite. Even when I have to work in an IDE (or pretty much anything that's not vim or a roguelike, for that matter), I become annoyed quite quickly that I can't navigate "properly" and how limited (in the case of many IDEs) or "backwards" (in the case of, e.g. emacs (I'm perfectly aware this is all entirely subjective, of course)) the editing capabilities are. Choose your poison and all that.
maigret 17y ago
Well they are graphical IDEs for mainframes. Java is also running very well on mainframes, as well as many web/appservers. This article makes a simplistic, though a bit funny image of the mainframe. Yes, the core and old stuff looks like that - no, there is also modern software running on the mainframe, else companies would stop investing in it.

by seldo 17y ago

The thing that struck me about his awestruck description of the awfulness of System Z and its editor was "hey, that sounds a lot like vi". I heart my graphical IDE.

DannoHung 17y ago

Take a week to learn modal editing and you'll never go back.

nrr 17y ago
I am a counterexample to your claim; hence, it is false. I'm very fluent in vi(m), but I still end up going back to Emacs (well, MicroEmacs) every time for anything beyond doing hacks to configuration files. Why? I like having a heavily extensible development environment. I also write Scheme, but that's another thing altogether.
- gord 17y ago
  It is a minor sadness that Bram didn't choose a lisp as the vim macro language. But I still love vim...although Ive forgotten more bindings than other editors have features.
  - nrr 17y ago
    I'm not actually all that certain I want Lisp as my extension language. Lisp is very, very nice, and while I may have a preference for it, someone else might not. FWIW, MicroEmacs uses an in-house extension language that, while really repulsive to look at at times, gets the job done. That said, I also have a preference for Lua when it comes to more maintream languages, and to boot, there's a project called LuaJIT that performs just-in-time compilation of Lua to native code. There's also MetaLua, which adds the feature of macros to the language. Better still, there's lua-Coat, which is a port of a subset of Moose from Perl (which is, in turn, a port of CLOS and other things to Perl) to Lua. Consider also just using Python or Io or any number of other languages. I guess my point is that it really doesn't depend on the language. If the environment isn't going to be extensible within reason, I probably won't use it. (Did you know that vim lacks the functionality to emulate Emacs' `create-frame`? That's a huge turn-off for me personally.)
aerique 17y ago
Editing isn't modal for everyone. I've used vi and Vim for years but I don't use them for more than a quick edit in a file these days.
lucumo 17y ago
I did for a year. I went back. Running.
- gloob 17y ago
  Heh. I'm about the opposite. Even when I have to work in an IDE (or pretty much anything that's not vim or a roguelike, for that matter), I become annoyed quite quickly that I can't navigate "properly" and how limited (in the case of many IDEs) or "backwards" (in the case of, e.g. emacs (I'm perfectly aware this is all entirely subjective, of course)) the editing capabilities are. Choose your poison and all that.

maigret 17y ago

Well they are graphical IDEs for mainframes. Java is also running very well on mainframes, as well as many web/appservers. This article makes a simplistic, though a bit funny image of the mainframe. Yes, the core and old stuff looks like that - no, there is also modern software running on the mainframe, else companies would stop investing in it.