From: ward@math.psu.edu (Brian Ward)
Subject: Re: Why I love VI
Summary: crying, with nightmare tears
Keywords: vi, speed, power, flame
Organization: The Society for Green Traffic Lights
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 04:09:16 GMT

It amuses me to see how many times this flame war appears. Oh well. I
should have some fun for a change, I guess...

In an old(er) article, bvaughan@lotka.Princeton.EDU (Barbara Vaughan) writes:
|I'm always amazed at the fact that the most rapidly evolving field of the
|20th century attracts so many people who adamantly refuse to evolve with
|it.

Now, that's a nominee for the next Usenet Olympiad's flame-baiting contest,
if I ever saw one. Congratulations.

|I'm 47 years old and my first editor was a keypunch machine.

I'm 19, and my first editor was the full-screen thing on the VIC-20. Whee!

|I've known people who refused to abandon their punch cards when tapes came
|along;

``I've known people who refused to abandon their pcs when unix came about''

hey wait, I still know these (##$%#!!!) people.

|who refused to abandon their tapes when disks came along,

I can put 5 gigs on a little 5 buck videotape. I just don't see your point.

|who maintained that line editors were vastly superior to full-screen editors,

Most line editors are, especially if the full-screen editor is on a VIC-20.

|who insisted Waterloo Script was a better word processor than Word Perfect

I think that country music is better than WordImPerfect(1). I've actually
never really seen a program as brain-dead as WordPerfect. Wait, I take that
back.

Waterloo Script happens to give you better output. However, *roff, will prove
more versatile. Dare I mention TeX? TeXinfo?

(1) I _hate_ country music.

|and that everything (including word processing) should be done on the
|mainframe computer because "decentralization" would lead to duplication of
|effort and lack of portability. 

Computers change. However, the idea of centralization is still very
important. Do you know how difficult it would be without a shared filesystem
or even a network? Or if everyone managed their own machine?

I, for one, shudder at the the thought of life without dataless clients.
(/usr nfs mounted for the uninformed. If you don't have a unix system, ignore
that.)

|I've known people so attached to their editors that they did their program
|editing on the IBM mainframe and downloaded the program to their PCs. 

Hmm. When I had to write my assembler for my final cs211 project on the
mainframe, I found that xedit was much too slow for typing in the code
initially. (This was mainly due to all of those damn screen repaints and
pfkeys.) So I started from scratch with vi on one of my unix machines and
when finished with writing most of it, I dumped it over to the mainframe
and debugged it there. Thank god for key bindings (I use emacs key bindings
on my 3270 sessions, even though I use vi. This may be due to the fact that
I have written quite a few emacs functions into x3270 like
transpose-character and backward-kill-word. Maybe I'm just fucked in the
head, too.)

So, anyway, does that make me one of your implied weenies?

|So stick with old-fashioned paper, Tom.  Be the world's greatest typist. 

Paper? Where? If you use vi or emacs, (actually, if you use any editor) you
should not need paper after a reasonable time, like a day, if you are
familiar with computers. For the newcomer, it might take a week.

|But you'd better be planning a second career, because I've seen five
|generations of people like you get pushed out by hotshot kids.

Heh. Someone who works for IBM once told me this.

|Office of Population Research
|Princeton University

Hey wow, did you know that most of the poeple at the Population Reasearch
Institute here use vi?

|bvaughan@opr.princeton.edu

Hey, why not make that an mx record instead of a cname?

;; QUESTIONS:
;;      opr.princeton.edu, type = ANY, class = IN

;; ANSWERS:
opr.princeton.edu.      86400   CNAME   lotka.Princeton.EDU.

and why doesn't there appear to be an opr.Princeton.EDU subdomain?

> ls opr.princeton.edu
[princeton.edu]
Host or domain name            Internet address
(a definite need of a ualarm() in here somewhere...)

this opr-106b.Princeton.EDU stuff is downright stupid, if you ask me.

why ask why? my, time flies. why do i try? are you high? sigh.

-brian

--
I put this line in here so that you would read it and wonder what it means.