Thanks and RIP.
Bram Moolenaar has died
281–290 of 449 posts
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#282Went to his website. There was an interview of him from 2022. The answer that really stroke me was not about Vim, but about software craftmanship vs professional programming: « I have been working for a company where quite a few managers, educated in physics and mechanics, thought the software was just the same as what they knew and they could decide how to make it. That company went downhill and was eventually taken…
What's wrong with the last sentence? For ease of consumption, the context again: > On the other end of the scale are people who want to write beautiful code, spend lots of time on it, and don’t care if it actually does what it was intended to do or what the budget was. Somewhere in between, there is a balance.
It’s remarkably uncommon to find an employee who strikes a balance between the two. But I think this doesn’t make the sentence wrong.
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#283I love what I do as a software engineer and a huge part of that is because I have a tool like vim. Thanks Bram. Rest in peace.
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#284As a huge fan of vim and now neovim (which would not exist without the amazing work of Bram and others on vim) I am saddened.
I didn't really know about him until I started reading about him in the comments to this post and wow, he seemed like a person I wish I could have known either as a friend or colleague or as a mentor or any combination thereof, seems we could all learn a bit from his example as it seems he remained cool under pressure and dedicated a lot of his time to vim the editor we all love.
Condolences to his family and friends and mates at Google.
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#285Few people could probably argue that they helped as many humans in dire situations like Bram did in his life. Vim was the first time I came across "charityware" as vim encourages users to donate to International Child Care Fund Holland on its splash screen, instead of begging for money for itself. I feel a bit of shame when I say that I've only donated to ICCF once over all these years.... As a remembrance of Bram an…
This is a great idea. Bram has made a huge positive impact on the world, even if most people aren't aware of it. I'd love to help make it even bigger. Edit: Hmm... PayPal seems to throw error after error at me when I try to donate. I'll keep trying.
Yay, PayPal let me through. I just had to turn off uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger... But for Bram, I'm ok with it.
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people who want to write beautiful code, spend lots of time on it, and don’t care if it actually does what it was intended to do There was a funny React framework a while back that has all kinds of cool state management and this and that, but it renders nothing. For the developers who spend more time theorizing, migrating, refactoring, than shipping. It's funny when people go back and forth about the time complexit…
I feel it's much more common to create abstractions without regard for performance cost of the abstraction. So keeping time complexity down, even for a piece that doesn't matter much, is above average for this sort of thing.
Creating abstractions without considering performance is probably the correct approach. It’s much better to at least start with a program with enough abstraction to allow reasoning about how things should work. Save performance concerns for when optimization is seen to be necessary.
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#287Fuck, reading all these comments i kind of feel we should have told him before he died how much we appreciated him…. :…( Like there should be an open source lifetime achievement award or something. Like the academy awards.
Call it the Moolenaar Award, maybe?
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bram had been spending over 30 years on Vim; and not just "the occasional patch/bugfix", but significant amounts, and almost every single day for some years. The number of people who spent that much time working on Open Source is very small, and the number of people who have spent that much time purely in their spare time is smaller still. In fact, I don't really know of anyone who even comes close to Bram. The numbe…
I don't know if Bram's family has this thread or is reading it, but the extent to which his work has impacted the software development community is enormous. Vim was one of the first pieces of software I learned when I switched to Linux in college. It was tricky at first, then it delighted me to no end. It remains a daily part of my life nearly 20 years later, and I'm still learning more about it every single year. I…
> I can't count the number of times I wish I could drop out of insert mode in normal web browser text boxes.
You can, if you really want to:
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#289I use vim almost every single day, and use vim-dialect in every other editor I use. I'm thankful for its existence and to Bram for developing it.
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#290Wow that hits rather hard actually. I never knew him other than through the welcome message on Vim, but he made one of the tools I rely on the most in my daily life. Thanks Bram, have a good afterlife.
Yes, very hard. I feel like I knew him - kind of silly given I've never met him and I don't think have even crossed emails with him. Yet I've used his work for decades and I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of him in Vim in a very real way. Wish I'd sent him a note to say thanks. GNU Bram.