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The Birth of vi
lanc writes "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, tells the story of how he wrote the vi editor. The article at The Register delves into his motives, who instigated the project, and some of the quirks of leaving a 'gift to mankind'. From the piece: '9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens. So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.'"
modal editors is the worst idea in the history of computing.
Interesting, I was going to say the best way to sum them up is that they are both ancient fucking relics with arcane "interfaces". Sure, *nix geeks will love it, and they may even devout a surprisingly pathetic amount of time mastering it because, "technically speaking, it provides a much more robust set of features than any GUI-based program." CLI will always have it's place... much like my half-retarded nephew who lives under the stairs... however as I for one can't wait for the day that intuitive interfaces rule the computing landscape with a soft, friendly fist!!!
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
r&eal problems that populatiOn as well
..would disagree that vi is like walkign across the river to get water. It works, at the end of the day the job is done, but it's still a fuck lot clumsier than JUST FREAKING DOING IT. \am i right?\\\\