![]() ![]() They require relearning how to do things that you did reliably the day before. There's nothing wrong with helpful new features, but too often those helpful new features come with a price. 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. ![]() 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. New ideas come along and in many cases they're good ideas, better than what was there before. The desire for the latest and greatest is a mental trap we all fall into to some degree. It ain't broke, why am I trying to fix it? I put down the shiny new stuff and got back to work. It does what the client wants to do well enough that they want me to port it to another part of their business. Is there anything wrong with it? Well, in a couple of places yes, but by and large, no. But then I stopped myself and stepped back and looked at the actual code. And I'll admit my first instinct was to rewrite the code in something more modern. I recently took on a new client with a codebase written in Symfony 1.0, which is old enough that I had to use just to find an overview of it. ![]() So much of software development these days feels like reinventing the wheel for the sake of it. 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. Interestingly, though, Vim's biggest rival, GNU Emacs, has a roughly similar development pace. 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.Įven 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. Ordinarily the update of a text editor wouldn't be worth mentioning, but this is the first major Vim release in ten years. To celebrate Vim's anniversary, creator Bram Moolenaar recently dropped version 8.0. 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |