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.

@grimalkina

Looking forward to reading your article BTW. I have been thinking about these issues for a long time.

@grimalkina @ink @mjd @b0rk I have nothing against making it easier for new developers, but there's other reasons for using and recommending tools that are perhaps harder to use besides the reasons you mentioned.

It's hard to get out of Big Tech's walled garden once you're in it (and you can see where that has led us).

The recommended open-source tools offer a stable platform that'll be with you for decades and work in a lot of different environments.
That's worth something as well.