[conor-]

> Should a novice programmer postpone their education by months because they need to satisfy the imaginary pre-requisite of learning vim via vimtutor?

I think this splits out into two camps of people:

1) People who are deeply curious and want to tinker and learn new things

2) People who view programming as a means to an end and want to build an app

If you're a novice I think you're better off falling into camp #1 even if it takes longer because you're still picking up education at every step of the way about what tools exist on your system and how to use them and then eventually once you're good enough you can coast and move into camp #2.

The same curiosity that led me to want to learn vim led to me wanting to learn about as many tools shipped with Linux as possible because I assumed many of them would be as powerful as vim was. That curiosity led to me eventually building up a much deeper intuition about how systems work and I think ultimately made me a better developer.

Is it a frustrating process? Maybe at times. But for the most part I think computers are fun and learning about them is fun even if I don't fully grok what I'm doing at the time.