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The State of Vim

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Re: The State of Vim

#31

Post by eviks »

flohofwoe wrote: post #29
eviks wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that'd be the wrong lesson to extend a period of using a bad governance model for longer

You need someone to say 'no' to all the stupid ideas, and also to the occasional good idea to stay focused. Committees and communities are quite bad at that. IME the BDFL model has mostly worked best for open source software development, unless the BDFL is a complete ass of course. (also software projects don't need to be democracies, e.g. people won't starve or sent to the gulag if things go sideways)

Saying "no" is the easiest job in the world, and committees are pretty good at it. That's why we have decades-old design failures everywhere, because saying "no" to an improvement is so much easier that doing the actual governing and resource allocation to see it through, especially with volunteers

And given the article describes big fails at basically every aspect of project management (from github account to money and website), not sure where you see the benefits of the supposed "focus"

Re: The State of Vim

#32

Post by The_Colonel »

mmooss wrote: post #10
eviks wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tool... emacs is 4% vs VSCode 73%, so it's not popular, though vim still is

Thanks. In more detail: Visual Studio Code 73.6% Visual Studio 29.3% IntelliJ IDEA 26.8% Notepad++ 23.9% Vim 21.6% Android Studio 16.1% PyCharm 15.1% Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab 12.8% Neovim 12.5% ... Emacs 4.2% ... Spacemacs 0.4% So Vim + Neovim = 34.1%, essentially second to Visual Studio, the overwhelming leader.

StackOverflow isn't representative. It was always skewed towards .NET world (and thus VS). I assume this is the case because the founders were prominent .NET personalities.

Re: The State of Vim

#33

Post by abraxas »

dmortin wrote: post #4

I wonder how long vim and emacs can stay vibrant. I've used emacs in the last 20 years, so I stick with it, but new generations who are trained on vscode and such are less likely to use such "old fashioned" tools. Surely, there will still be emacs and vim users 50 years from now, but the user numbers and the community power will diminish as the graybeards gradually leave this plane.

Lots of editors and IDEs came and went while Emacs/Vim persisted. Through my three decade career I recall the ascents and downfalls of tools like BRIEF, CodeWright, NEdit, JEdit, TextPad, Notepad++, Visual Studio, JBuilder, Eclipse, Sublime and a few others so the cemetary (or hospice in some of those cases) is large.

Re: The State of Vim

#34

Post by psychoslave »

flohofwoe wrote: post #29
eviks wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that'd be the wrong lesson to extend a period of using a bad governance model for longer

You need someone to say 'no' to all the stupid ideas, and also to the occasional good idea to stay focused. Committees and communities are quite bad at that. IME the BDFL model has mostly worked best for open source software development, unless the BDFL is a complete ass of course. (also software projects don't need to be democracies, e.g. people won't starve or sent to the gulag if things go sideways)

Unless your software deals with tracking people within an organization that will of course comply with the political parties that rule the regions where there software operate.

Re: The State of Vim

#35

Post by rob74 »

dmortin wrote: post #4

I wonder how long vim and emacs can stay vibrant. I've used emacs in the last 20 years, so I stick with it, but new generations who are trained on vscode and such are less likely to use such "old fashioned" tools. Surely, there will still be emacs and vim users 50 years from now, but the user numbers and the community power will diminish as the graybeards gradually leave this plane.

To put it into perspective: vi was already 15 years old when Bram decided to write vim for the Amiga, which had a GUI - so vim already looked out of place on the Amiga too! - but it was still successful, of course (I think) mostly because of being ported to Linux pretty much at the same time as Linux got started.

Re: The State of Vim

#36

Post by bawolff »

eviks wrote: post #31
flohofwoe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need someone to say 'no' to all the stupid ideas, and also to the occasional good idea to stay focused. Committees and communities are quite bad at that. IME the BDFL model has mostly worked best for open source software development, unless the BDFL is a complete ass of course. (also software projects don't need to be democracies, e.g. people won't starve or sent to the gulag if things go sideways)

Saying "no" is the easiest job in the world, and committees are pretty good at it. That's why we have decades-old design failures everywhere, because saying "no" to an improvement is so much easier that doing the actual governing and resource allocation to see it through, especially with volunteers And given the article describes big fails at basically every aspect of project management (from github account to money…

There are two types of comittees:

Those that are paralyzed by fear of change and say no to everything, and those that are afraid of offending people and say yes to everything. Both are counterproductive.

Re: The State of Vim

#37

Post by emblaegh »

openmarkand wrote: post #30
porphyra wrote: post #11

Many of the Vim nerds I know, including myself, have switched over to Neovim. Only when using a remote server with a default installation do I use regular old Vim.

I have tried several times and I always switched back to vanilla vim. Neovim has various nice features but it requires a lot of time to migrate correctly IMHO. 20 years of habits are hard to leave, I think. Sure the configuration file is retro compatible, but some of the plugins are better suited for neovim and vice versa. I use a dozen of them and if I switch permanently to neovim I'd like to start fresh using more…

When I migrated years ago (mostly to get access to some plugins), nvim gladly swallowed my old configuration with no changes. Then I could change to lua and other modern features at my own pace.

Re: The State of Vim

#38

Post by riffraff »

eviks wrote: post #31
flohofwoe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need someone to say 'no' to all the stupid ideas, and also to the occasional good idea to stay focused. Committees and communities are quite bad at that. IME the BDFL model has mostly worked best for open source software development, unless the BDFL is a complete ass of course. (also software projects don't need to be democracies, e.g. people won't starve or sent to the gulag if things go sideways)

Saying "no" is the easiest job in the world, and committees are pretty good at it. That's why we have decades-old design failures everywhere, because saying "no" to an improvement is so much easier that doing the actual governing and resource allocation to see it through, especially with volunteers And given the article describes big fails at basically every aspect of project management (from github account to money…

> committees are pretty good at it.

I don't know it seems to me that committees are famously bad at it, so that we use "design by committee" for something that refuses to take a single direction and either makes bad compromises or says "yes" to all options.

Re: The State of Vim

#39

Post by bawolff »

porphyra wrote: post #11

Many of the Vim nerds I know, including myself, have switched over to Neovim. Only when using a remote server with a default installation do I use regular old Vim.

People who describe themselves as "vim nerds" might not be representitive of the average vim user.

Re: The State of Vim

#40

Post by wirrbel »

joeblubaugh wrote: post #21
mmooss wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Stack Overflow survey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42811182 Vim 21.6% Neovim 12.5% I wonder what it looked like in prior years.

I’m willing to believe that “vim” combines some neovim users, but I’m not surprised that the original is still more popular. Anecdotally vim seems to ship new features faster than it did 3 years ago.

Braam really took Neovim personally and got better at getting stuff into vim that he wouldn't merge before once neovim was arround as a competitor. I really lost track of vim in the last years because neovim is just a solid platform with an active community.

But honestly at work, I think I am the only one using either a vim or emacs (I kind of use neovim and emacs but primarily neovim). In my childhood there was a TV series called "The last of his class" and it really showed old people (retirement age) doing jobs that will be gone once their retire. While some jobs truly vanished, others just transformed so drastically that they cannot be likened anymore to the job those folks did. Anyway, I feel we are watching changes in developer tooling that will be seen as the end of an era.

* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Letzte_seines_Standes%3F

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