Joe's Own Editor 4.0 Released

> I once had a (prominent?) figure in the startup community walk past my desk and tell me he'd fire me if I worked for him, because it couldn't be productive to work in an editor like that.

That was a truly awful thing for someone to say. We all go through learning phases, and making fun of someone for the technology they choose to use is just hateful, not to mention discouraging.

I originally learned on Solaris using pico (as part of a college "intro to UNIX" class), and I'm highly thankful for the person who sat next to me and suggested I check out Debian. I used nano when I first installed Linux, because nano-tiny was the default editor on Debian. I knew enough vi to hit :q! or ZZ if I somehow ended up in nvi. Much later, I learned Emacs, on the assumption that I needed to learn one of the big two programmer's editors, and I couldn't stand the modal nature of vim; to this day my .emacs enables CUA mode. Much later I learned vim, partly by way of shared screen sessions with a proficient vim user.

Or hey, if you really want to make fun of my past technology choices, I used to write VBA code 15 years ago, which in the snarking order of overly opinionated geeks probably puts me somewhere between PHP programmers and COBOL programmers. Some of that VBA code is still in use today, which is both an amusing and terrifying thought.

I've had a long and winding path to the current set of technologies I use. I'm sure many other people have similarly long and winding paths, and weren't always using the same set of technologies they do today. If anything, that provides a level of breadth.

(On occasion I've been known to snark at specific technologies, such as PHP or MySQL. That doesn't mean I'm going to make fun of people who use those technologies productively, especially when learning. There is a time for offering constructive suggestions about alternative technologies and the features and benefits of using them; certainly if someone seeks out advice for what to use then by all means recommend your preferred technologies and give reasons for those recommendations. But drive-by snarkage and belittling about someone's choice of editor? That's just wrong.)

Yeah, I think/hope he was trying to be funny as it was a comment made in passing. He also had almost no connection to my employer, so it wasn't very scary.

It's stuck with me ever since, though, so it seems to have meant something.

Over the years thinking about it lent me the same perspective you have. I used to be one of those really annoying anti-X (PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) zealots. I thought it was funny but that experience made it clear to me that random snark can really hurt. Plenty of people use plenty of "joke" technologies to make real software people use every day, and snarking out on them is unlikely to help. I'll still steer people clear of MongoDB especially, but it's in more constructive ways and with a more clear eye towards actual use case.

Of all the editors I've used, Joe does have a feature nothing else matches: the ability to edit really large files, seamlessly. Try opening two gigabytes of debug.log in Sublime or Vim, some time. And then go make a coffee. Joe would open that file instantly and be ready to go.

Syntax highlighting messes that up. But you can shut it off by editing the config files.