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Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

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Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#91

Post by a3n »

haberman wrote: post #32
sramsay wrote: post #2

Perhaps this was mentioned the other day, but Neovim did make me think of this old chestnut from Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I realize Neovim is being characterized as an "aggressive refactor," but I'm sure that's the way Netscape thought of it as well. tl;dr Things you should never do: rewrite the code from scratch.

With that thinking we never get Linux (NeoMinix), tmux (NeoScreen), Clang (NeoGCC), WebKit (NeoGecko), Subversion (NeoCVS), or Vim itself (NeoVi/Elvis/Stevie/etc).

Call it a clone, refactor, rewrite, fork, whatever.

If it gets subsumed into Vim I'll use it without having to choose.

If it gets traction as a second thing, I'll try it.

If it's better than Vim I'll keep it.

Let them write, good luck, have fun, I'll try it if I hear from HN that it's good enough to use.

I don't think it violates "don't rewrite" because these aren't the Vim people. Vim itself won't "suffer" from the ill effects of a rewrite.

Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#92

Post by username223 »

pit wrote: post #53
haberman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neovim is being sold as a VIM refactor, but apparently with no new functionality Where did you get that idea? When I read the project page ( https://github.com/neovim/neovim ), two of the explicit goals are: "Enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source. "Improve the extensibility power with a new plugin architecture based on coprocesses. Plugins will be writt…

The original mailing list message says: "There's a new project that is called Neovim that seeks to refactor and modernize the codebase"

"Try blue - it's the new red!"

Someone should try to make some money replacing tabs with spaces and snake_case with camelCase.

Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#93

Post by huherto »

> It's going to be an awful lot of work, with the result that not all systems will be supported, new bugs introduced and what's the gain for the end user exactly?

That may be a problem for vim but not for neovim. Neovim doesn't have a legacy user base, they can focus on the currently used systems.

Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#95

Post by username223 »

_delirium wrote: post #86
kbrosnan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebKit does not work for your analogy. WebKit and Gecko are two completely separate HTML parsing engines. Maybe you ment neo-kHTML.

There's also Google's Blink, the Neo-WebKit.

Joel didn't consider forks for corporate-political of self-promotional reasons. Naively enough, he assumed they were attempts to improve software.

Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#96

Post by kentosi »

sramsay wrote: post #2

Perhaps this was mentioned the other day, but Neovim did make me think of this old chestnut from Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I realize Neovim is being characterized as an "aggressive refactor," but I'm sure that's the way Netscape thought of it as well. tl;dr Things you should never do: rewrite the code from scratch.

I think that this is an unfair comparison. Netscape and Borland were business with financial targets, deadlines and (more importantly,) competitors vying for the same market share.

These guys don't have these pressures, nor did (as per haberman's comment) Linux, tmux, Clang, WebKit, etc as far as I'm aware.

Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#97

Post by cseelus »

CJefferson wrote: post #7

To be fair to the authors of neovim, there were patches they wrote and submitted to vim, which added exciting new features I would like, which were rejected. People who basically want him to never change (and that is fine) can be happy with mainline. There are others who would like to see some significant updates, particularly allowing better threading support.

Yeah, threading comes to mind, as well as decend indentation of wrapped lines. Both rejected.

Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#98

Post by mekoka »

Total refactoring is not a solution.

To Diego: Prove him wrong. I suspect that Bram has been maintaining the code base for so long, that he might need a bit more than a mere message to warm him up to the idea of a refactoring to the scale that you're undertaking. Also, you might not be the first person to contact him with such a proposal. I wonder how long it took for others before they gave up. Build something tangible and contact him again later with proof of concept, something that would make this more than just a fleeting dream.

To people questioning Bram's position: You need to look a bit further than your nose. The fact that you want to create plugins or extensions does not put you in the mainstream as a Vim user. It's an extremely popular editor of almost religious proportion, with lots of existing plugins and extensions. So we know that people use it and making plugins is possible. With all of its annoyances it gets the majority of the job done for most users. One can't just wake up one day and say that they'll change things, not even Bram at this point.

The most desirable outcome in my opinion would be to have Neovim be a continuation of Vim (Vim 10.0?) rather than just another fork, and for that, having Bram on board would be a boon. His longevity as a maintainer is impressive.

Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#99

Post by mildtrepidation »

sramsay wrote: post #2

Perhaps this was mentioned the other day, but Neovim did make me think of this old chestnut from Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I realize Neovim is being characterized as an "aggressive refactor," but I'm sure that's the way Netscape thought of it as well. tl;dr Things you should never do: rewrite the code from scratch.

tl;dr Things you should never do: rewrite the code from scratch.

Sentiment like this is not valuable. The experience that it comes from is often informative, but as a conclusion, this explicitly ignores circumstances that sometimes do make rewriting a good, compelling course of action.

Truly bad, unmaintainable code exists. It exists on projects that have long intended futures. It exists in all sorts of environments on all sorts of projects for all sorts of reasons. To discount the idea of a rewrite out of hand is a failure to objectively review the specific circumstances around whatever it is you're working on.

Often there are better ways, and yes, often a rewrite is a bad idea. But absolutes are so rarely valid, and this one is most certainly not universally true.

Re: Bram Moolenaar responds to Neovim

#100

Post by shadowfox »

sramsay wrote: post #2

Perhaps this was mentioned the other day, but Neovim did make me think of this old chestnut from Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I realize Neovim is being characterized as an "aggressive refactor," but I'm sure that's the way Netscape thought of it as well. tl;dr Things you should never do: rewrite the code from scratch.

> but I'm sure that's the way Netscape thought of it as well

Don't really think so. At least as far Netscape 6 went, they came up with an entirely different framework and moved over to Java (as far as I remember). I have rarely seen that sort of thing characterized as a refactor (even on their mailing lists).

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