[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Assisting Elise S with editing grub.cfg

Quoting goossbears (acohen36@gmail.com):

> Given vim's direct relationship to vi, that immediately brings to mind
> the widely known xkcd 'Real Programmers' cartoon https://xkcd.com/378/
> ;-)

It definitely had to end in an emacs joke!

There's actually a good reason why programmers tend to gravitate towards
emacs, and it's different but equally compelling to the reason
sysadmins tend to gravitate towards vi:  A finely tuned, personalised
emacs enviroment is a significant aid to productivity, _but_ doesn't
easily replicate from one machine to the next (or so I'm told).  So,
because coders can typically concentrate on making their home machine's
environment exactly right, the net benefit of all of that tweaking is
high.  Also, emacs really was designed from the get-go as a specialised
development tool for coders.  

By contrast, as I was mentioning, a larval-stage sysadmin benefits
greatly from mastering the core features of a very capable but
fundamentally basic, general-purpose editor that is reliably present
everywhere the sysadmin can expect to need to be productive (i.e., all
*ix machines).  It just happened to be vi that filled that niche.  vi's
value lay not in being insanely great; that value lay in being both
capable and fully available in its core feature set on all systems of
interest.[1]

nano doesn't have 1/10 the core functionality that basic vi does, but
that's not really the point.  nano had no opportunity to propagate into
vi's niche of being a universal *ix full-screen text editor, because vi
got there first.

(vi wasn't the first common *ix text editor, e.g., there were variously
awful and weird contenders like TECO,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor).  Why those never took
off is too long a story for here.)


[1] A number of vi variants have become obscure since the early days of
Linux.  One of my sentimental favourites was 'elvis', if only because, 
if you exited your shell session and left a file open in /usr/bin/elvis,
you received e-mail about that from elvis.  Punch line:  You thereby
received proof that elvis is alive!

See:  http://www.linfo.org/vi/clones.html

Because of overshadowing of BSD legal rights by the AT&T v. UC Regents
lawsuit, for a very long time, Bill Joy's original vi implementation,
first released for 1BSD in 1976, was assumed to be AT&T-proprietary, and
so was shunned by free-software Unixes.  The first absolutely complete
from-scratch vi clone was Keith Bostic's nvi (1994), based in part on 
Steve Kirkendall's 'elvis', was immediately adopted as the standard 'vi'
by the BSDs and by many Linux users (including Michael Paoli), and
interest in Bill Joy's original waned.  Although primordial vi was
-eventually- made available under a BSD-ish licence
http://www.mckusick.com/csrg/calder-lic.pdf) as 'Traditional Vi'
starting in 2002 (http://ex-vi.cvs.sourceforge.net), it's not clear that
anyone cared much, as it had long been supplanted.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BerkeleyLUG" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to berkeleylug+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/berkeleylug/20200721061613.GG3481%40linuxmafia.com.