[u-u] Love/hate tools

[Eric Siegerman]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 08:14:22PM -0400, Bill Duncan wrote:
> Religious debates are always fun..
>
> http://billduncan.org/vi-or-emacs-really/

I've been using "set -o vi" for decades, but didn't know about
.inputrc.  I'll have to try that and see which of the things I
use are improved by it.  Thanks.

For me, vi[1] is among a small class of tools that I simultaneously
loathe and find indispensible (or used to loathe until, without
my really noticing, they became so second-nature that I stopped
noticing how awful they are).  Offensively bad design, and at the
same time, immensely powerful and (once you've plowed through the
pain) expressive. [2]

vi was my first encounter with such a beast, in the mid-80s, and
seemed even worse because its screen mode was so (and, I suspect,
so gratuitously) unlike its own ed/qed underpinnings.

I suspect I'd have felt the same way about [tn]roff if I'd ever
tried to use them "in anger".  (And this from someone who knew my
way quite well around a GCOS version of roff back in the day.)

My love/hate tool of the 90s was Perl, but like vi, it's become
completely wired in by now.

My current one is git.  It's the most confusing, least usable,
and most poorly (even though most voluminously) documented of the
three DVCSes I've worked with (bzr and hg being the other two),
but it's become my tool of choice, even though it still offends
me on pretty much a weekly basis.

Back at university in the 70s, we used to say approvingly of qed
that "if you design a tool that even a fool can use, then only a
fool will want to."  I still agree with that, and still have fond
memories of GCOS qed (and later, Peter Fraser's derivative,
fred), even though I'm sure I'd find them pretty primitive now.
It's just that I believe there's a difference between inherent
complexity and gratuitously bad design (or, in git's case, what
seems to be an utter lack of any conscious attempt at UI design.)


[1] vim these days.  Its improvements over plain-old-vi are
    many and important, but even if it was vim I'd been exposed
    to in ~1984, I don't think my feelings would have been much
    different.

[2] Why did I never give emacs a serious try?  It's hard to
    recall, but here's what I think it boiled down to:
      - I preferred vi's modiness to emacs's even more extensive
	dependence on modifier keys.  I might well opine differently
	today...

      - Lisp

      - No ed/qed under the hood

    Actually, the last two of those are connected.  I wouldn't have
    had the language then to express it, but I disliked the idea of
    having to write code to do what :ex let me say declaratively.
    (Which may well be unfair to emacs, but it was my thinking at the
    time.)

  - Eric