I haven’t blogged for a while and I forgot how internet commenters can get bizarrely angry about statements like “I got tired of managing my vim config so I decided to stop using vim for now”, as if it’s some kind of attack on vim (or on them??)

It makes me really appreciate @grimalkina’s work on developer culture, like this https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2gej5_v2

I still have a lot to learn but her work has helped me start to understand where this stuff comes from

(I used vim for a long time and I love it!)

@b0rk @grimalkina I was astonished when I said in a talk that the C++ macro feature was bad and people got mad at me. I thought it was self-evident and that even big fans of C++ would agree with me that the macro system was one of the worst parts of the language.

Instead they just got angry.

@b0rk @grimalkina A while back I was helping my kid with her CS class homework and sent her a followup email observing:

“You lost a lot of time and energy dealing with issues like: Using vim; copying files back and forth with scp; losing the network connection; the college shared machine is slow and yucky.”

“It's important to remove as much friction as possible from your basic process. Otherwise it's like trying to cook with dull knives and rusty pots, except worse because it interrupts your train of thought. You can't do good work with bad tools.”

“When you start the next project, start it in VScode in the beginning. And maybe set aside an hour or two before you start in earnest, just to go through the VSCode tutorial and familiarize yourself with its basic features, without trying to do that at the same time you are actually thinking about your homework. This will pay off quickly.”

Then I published the letter on my blog and boy oh boy did I get a lot of hate from the vim fans.

But the simple fact was, she lost a lot of time and energy dealing with vim.

@mjd i did a podcast interview once where someone asked me why developers should learn vim and I said something like “I don’t know, maybe they shouldn’t! people should use what they like”

the attitude that people “should” use it is so baffling to me