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by renewiltord 131 days ago
People have always resisted change especially one that modifies the way they work. They’d rather work on the same thing for life. To get them to adopt new tools you need to do this stuff.

And yes, people did resist IDEs (“I’m best with my eMacs” - no you weren’t), people resisted the “sufficiently smart compiler”, and so on. What happened was that they were replaced by the sheer growth in the industry providing new people who didn’t have these constraints.

2 comments

Emacs is an interesting analogy. I've switched from IDEs to Emacs at some point in my career, and inertia obviously wasn't the reason. Then another 15 years later I went back to using IDEs (inspired by Carmack's interview). 2 years in I realized it destroyed my ability to generate and maintain mental maps of the codebase and generally remember things about it, although I think it's still a net gain so I stick with it. Agentic coding poses the exact same problem and the exact same tradeoff. And I think the jury is still out on whether it's worth it. At the very minimum you need to take proactive measures least you end up with a codebase no one can maintain (other than maybe future AGI).
It's Emacs. Also Emacs is an IDE.
Yeah, it's not clear to me why my iPhone keyboard does that but I didn't correct it. Indeed, emacs is love, emacs is life. Emacs is all things. Emacs is nothing and everything.

https://imgur.com/a/PNR99un

Your Apple product does that because its dictionary contains historic Apple products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMac