Good morning,
On 1/18/07, Uriel <lost.goblin_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> If you have trouble finding the right regular expression, then you
> should not be writing code.
It's not about having trouble to find the right regular expression,
it's about believing that it's not the best way to do _all_ text
editing. Regular expressions are a strong tool, but aren't the best
solution in all cases (Powerdrills are useful tools too, but not for
putting a nail in a piece of wood). Sometimes I just want to be able
to say "change _this_ specific piece of text", rather than "find a
place where this word appears in such and such a context, and change
it to this". Take the line "aap noot aap mies aap mus aap pim", and
say I want to change the third occurence of "aap" with "boom"; Sure,
that's possible with an RE, but I'd rather just point at the word and
change it. Vim makes this possible with its cursor position (and,
surprise surprise, your beloved Sam and Acme allow such things too;
why oh why would that be?).
> But in the end it all comes down to thinking before you type, ken
Of course.
> wrote Unix with cat (1) and ed(1), if you can find anyone that is even
> 1% as productive and uses vim, it will be a miracle and I will start
> to believe in a God other than Glenda.
No doubt, but we weren't talking about Ken's productivity, we were
talking about whether certain editors increase your productivity in
general. Taking a demigod as an example for the general case isn't
much of an argument (it's sort of like saying "Smoking isn't bad for
you! Take a look at my friends uncle, he smoked a pack of cigarettes
every day ever since he was twelve, now he's ninety and still alive
and kicking!" (except my friends uncle isn't a demigod)).
Besides, I think the fact that Ken wrote Unix with cat and ed is also
influenced by the time it was written in (and what was and wasn't
available at that time). Does Ken still do mayor coding with ed and or
cat?
Greetings, Sander.
Received on Fri Jan 19 2007 - 08:33:24 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Sun Jul 13 2008 - 16:19:06 UTC