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A Eulogy for Vim

drewdevault.com

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Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#11

Post by rkapsoro »

School-Cotton wrote: post #6
mikkupikku wrote: post #2

I've long had great respect for Drew, way since way back when he was sircmpwn writing cool calculator software. Great programmer, and an incredibly based individual. Stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming pressure. I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I…

Computer programming has been accessible to the masses for years. All you need is motivation to learn. The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.

I'm sure certain people accustomed to hand assembly were saying this when compilers emerged on the scene.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#12

Post by scrollaway »

mikkupikku wrote: post #2

I've long had great respect for Drew, way since way back when he was sircmpwn writing cool calculator software. Great programmer, and an incredibly based individual. Stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming pressure. I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I…

> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses

I've been coding for 24 years and vibe coding has made computer programming accessible to me.

I've burned out on my work several times, to the point that a few years ago I became unable to open my IDE without getting headaches and nausea. This has killed one of the startups where I was fractional CTO and it's debilitating as an engineer to feel this.

Vibe coding has changed this. I'm once again productive. Like, 1000x more productive than I could ever be.

AI is an amplifier. It amplifies shit engineering into shittier code, but I also deeply believe it amplifies people who care about polish and love of their craft into so, so much more.

I've been "as a side project" finishing a bookkeeping app I could never finish (https://financica.app/) and adding so many features that are pure polish, which I always wanted to add but the ROI was just not there.

Like, the other day I wrote (using AI) a PDF parser for a specific type of account statements from the Belgian government, turning those into perfect data for the books. This saves me a ton of time as a user, nobody in the world has this automation for those types of statements, and it would have taken me several months of full time work to write and automate all of this, learning PDF libraries, dealing with the output, figuring out geometry, writing a battery of tests, etc. I would never have done it. But now, in less than an hour the whole feature was built, shipped and announced.

It's awesome.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#13

Post by fhd2 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #3

> I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are…

> I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".

Well, yeah? Just because the current work safety situation is bad, doesn't mean being out of a job couldn't be worse. I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#15

Post by herodoturtle »

> And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate the jobs of the poor and replace them with a robot that lies.

That sentence jumped out at me.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#16

Post by ericd »

AlexandrB wrote: post #3

> I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are…

>This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.

Neither solar panels nor Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries require cobalt. Pretty sure all the emphasis on that is mainly meant to cloud things and try to paint these things as just as bad for the environment as eg coal, and apparently it's been very successful based on how frequently I see it repeated, but it's not true currently. It was true with NMC batteries, but I think those have fallen out of favor even in EVs, and grid scale is dominated by LFP. Don't think solar panels have ever needed cobalt, they're glass, aluminum, silicon, and a bit of silver/copper. Thin films have cadmium sometimes, but those aren't the ones in use en masse for solar farms.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#17

Post by arjie »

I love it. Some alternative pathways in code make finding good solutions more likely. I've always liked Neovim, so I'm going to stick with it. I use it in a pretty much vanilla mode. Just deoplete et al.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#18

Post by odst »

mikkupikku wrote: post #2

I've long had great respect for Drew, way since way back when he was sircmpwn writing cool calculator software. Great programmer, and an incredibly based individual. Stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming pressure. I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I…

The argument that "vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses" is something I don't understand. With all the free content on the internet, was it not accessible before?

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#20

Post by UweSchmidt »

It doesn't look like they put AI into vim like Microsoft into Notepad. Someone used an outside AI to code something with vimscript, what do you expect? I'll be worried if they mess with even the smallest bit of established muscle memory of any vim user, but a separate language (probably a dead end) and apparently some new diff options don't seem too terrible.
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