MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-02-11 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] vim and the free software world
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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/24/boring_vim_beats_exciting_browsers/
Oh, the things Vim could teach Silicon Valley's code slingers
25 years, eight updates, all gravy
Cat in the hat
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24 Jan 2017 at 11:04, Scott Gilbertson
Open Source Insider Vim text editor turned 25 late last year – the first
public iteration was launched on November 2, 1991, a couple of weeks
after Linus Torvalds announced Linux. To celebrate Vim's anniversary,
creator Bram Moolenaar recently dropped version 8.0.
Ordinarily the update of a text editor wouldn't be worth mentioning, but
this is the first major Vim release in ten years. In today's world,
where web browsers drop major point updates (what they consider major,
anyway) several times a year, Vim's lack of major updates is not just
refreshing, but speaks of an entirely different approach to developing
software.
Even leaving aside the absurd version system of today's web browsers,
eight releases in 25 years would be considered slow by today's software
development standards. Interestingly, though, Vim's biggest rival, GNU
Emacs, has a roughly similar development pace. GNU Emacs began life in
the 1970s and is currently at version 25, which means it averages two
releases to Vim's one, but still definitely on the slow side.
Yet Vim and Emacs taken together may well be the most used software in
the software developer's toolkit.
As a long-time Vim user (since 2005 or so), Vim's lack of updates may
well be my favourite feature. Vim is Vim. It does what I need it to do
and it doesn't try to completely reinvent itself every six months. In
fact, I had been using version eight for several weeks without even
realising it, which at this point is pretty close to my definition of
great software – if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Contrast this with your favourite web browser, which pushes out updates
every six weeks. I don't even need to know what your favourite browser
is to make this generalisation because they all do it. Now some of this
frantic update pace can be attributed to the fact that the browser is a
newer idea, there are more bugs to work out. That sounds good. Until you
think about what Vim, and even more so Emacs, is capable of, which
includes, in Emacs' case, being able to render HTML using WebKit.
So much of software development these days feels like reinventing the
wheel for the sake of it. I recently took on a new client with a
codebase written in Symfony 1.0, which is old enough that I had to use
Archive.org just to find an overview of it. And I'll admit my first
instinct was to rewrite the code in something more modern. But then I
stopped myself and stepped back and looked at the actual code. Is there
anything wrong with it? Well, in a couple of places yes, but by and
large, no. It works. It does what the client wants to do well enough
that they want me to port it to another part of their business. It ain't
broke, why am I trying to fix it? I put down the shiny new stuff and got
back to work.
The desire for the latest and greatest is a mental trap we all fall into
to some degree. New ideas come along and in many cases they're good
ideas, better than what was there before. To stick with Vim as an
example, version eight does have a bunch of cool new stuff, like support
for asynchronous I/O, channels, JSON, jobs, timers and GTK+ 3 among
other things. None of that is immediately, obviously useful on its own,
but all of which opens the door for some new and potentially very
powerful Vim extensions.
There's nothing wrong with helpful new features, but too often those
helpful new features come with a price. They require relearning how to
do things that you did reliably the day before. And even the most
helpful features cease to be helpful if they require me to completely
change my existing workflow. Vim 8 was a totally transparent update. It
didn't require me to learn some new way of working, it didn't completely
break extensions I rely on just so it could round off some corners in
the UI (OK, Vim doesn't really have a UI, but if it did I feel pretty
confident that it wouldn't waste time rounding corners on tabs, cough,
Firefox).
A common defence of the rapid release cycles common in today's software,
graphical and otherwise, is that things must progress. To not progress
is to deny ourselves the birthright of, uh, progress?
Stagnation is the equivalent of death apparently, which is as much a
cultural value as one of the software produced by that culture, but
either way it might be worth remembering that there is something else
that pursues growth at all costs, dividing over and over again in a
ceaseless headlong rush – cancer cells.
The more time I spend meditating on this analogy the more accurate it
feels. To be clear, I am not talking about security updates. Security
updates improve software and are a good thing. What I'm talking about
are the needless UI rewrites that don't actually do anything for users
(web browsers seem to be the most egregious example of this), the
development frameworks that reinvent themselves with every point update,
or the latest trend: abstractions that promise to simplify everything
but end up increasing the complexity of everything.
To pick what I think is the most absurd example of this trend, look at
CSS, an incredibly simple syntax for styling web pages. But, no, it
turns out that CSS is too complex, so we get Sass. But then Sass doesn't
quite do what we want so we get Compass and now what used to be
something so simple few would call it programming requires two
interdependent frameworks, Ruby and half a dozen Gems to output CSS we
could have just written in Vim.
Then there's the insanity of deployment. Deployment tool chains are the
most aggressive cancer around right now. All to save you from being a
complete Philistine who just pushes and pulls to a git repo, or,
Festivus help you, uploads files over scp.
Alas, I don't expect things to change from their current course. If
anything the future looks to be full of more abstractions, more
pointless UI rewrites, more frameworks that break backwards
compatibility, and more cancer-like growth. Which is why Vim is so
important.
At least our text editors will still be there, stalwart unchanging
places to reliably weather the storm. Thanks, Vim, I quite literally
could not do what I do without you. Happy 25th birthday and here's to
another ten years before Vim 9 rolls around. ®
Tips and corrections
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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