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by horsawlarway
2015 days ago
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I agree with this. This whole story gives me "hacker in movies" vibes. Programming isn't about artfully manipulating input devices while watching characters scroll fancifully across the screen. It's about understanding a problem in depth, and considering possible implementations/problems/edge cases. If you spend more time typing than thinking - I will unequivocally call you a bad developer (or a developer who's job is ripe for automation...). --- Now - no knock on Vim. I much prefer it to nano, and if you enjoy using it, more power to ya. I do agree there's a certain sense of "playing a musical instrument" feeling to it. But playing music and composing music are NOT the same. In the same way that entering text and programming are NOT the same. |
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I compose because improvising on a single instrument is not enough for me. But it really is like improvising with edits, and being a good improviser will improve your compositions just as your compositions will improve your improvisations. And ultimately, you are doing these things because you love to play and hear music.
The appeal of vim is that it encapsulates programmatic thinking into the act of editing. With each edit, you are making a little program: "select these words with these conditions but not those other conditions, and then, for the first (expression x/y) of them, transform them thusly. Then, select the parent containers, and pipe each one to this file-descriptor to be processed externally."
But you can do this with a few keystrokes, you just have to think ahead a little. That is, it makes the act of programming and entering/editing text one and the same activity, allowing you to do little programmatic improvisations.
I switched from music to code when I realized I got more enjoyment out of code than music. That is, I echo your statements "if you enjoy using it, more power to ya" and "playing music and composing are NOT the same," but also: sometimes playing music and composing are the same, and sometimes the only reason you are composing (or playing music) at all is because it feels so wonderful to do both at the same time.