In article <mailman.13359.1408831344.18130.python-l...@python.org>, Anders Wegge Keller <we...@wegge.dk> wrote: >On Sun, 24 Aug 2014 00:56:11 +1000 >Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > >> Despite my comments, I don't actually have any objection to people who >> choose to use Emacs, or Vim, or edit their text files by poking the hard >> drive platter with a magnetised needle if they prefer :-) But I do think >> it's silly of them to claim that Emacs has no learning curve, or to fail to >> recognise how unfamiliar and different the UIs are compared to nearly >> everything else a computer user is likely to be familiar with in 2014. > > Really, they don't! At least not for the people, for whom they are >necessary tools. When I started in my present job, "remote access" was >a dial-up modem, that could do 2400 baud, if you were lucky[1]. With such a >shitty connection, a text-only editor is indisputably the right thing.
> > Curiously enough, even today the same lousy kind of connections prevail. We >still have a sizeable modem bank at my job. We still do our remote support >over a telnet/ssh session. And we still are unable to reliable get the >connection speeds[2], that would make anything with a GUI remotely >pleasant. > > So emacs and vim still have their niches. Those of us, who are old enough >to have started our first job in a glorified teletype, OR have to support >systems that are only reachable over RFC-1149 quality datalinks, belong >there. The rest of you would probably be better off with something nicer. > >1. Meaning a real switched landline all the way from Denmark to Tokyo. >Ending up with two satellite up/down-links was a killer. > >2. We have an installation in the Philippines, where we ended up installing a > satellite uplink. It feels like we have doubled the connectivity of the > entire Manilla area by doing so. And it's still painfully slow. Right. I remember having a 300 baud dial up line. Edwin's editor (ee), the editor I'm using right now, was optimised for screen access, and I could do cursor based full screen editing, quite passably, doing a vt100 emulation on my Osborne CP/M machine. (I've a non transferable license and ee is not for sale.) > >-- >//Wegge Groetjes Albert -- Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters. albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
