Bram Moolenaar has died(groups.google.com) |
Bram Moolenaar has died(groups.google.com) |
Thank you Bram.
I only gave once several years ago to help children of Uganda. I will do again in his honor, https://iccf-holland.org/donate.html.
:wq
I checked out various other clones back in the day — vim was way better afaict.
PS: A major reason I use Vim rather than Emacs is that the arrow keys worked in Vim but not emacs. On Slackware. No I don’t use the ijkl keys to move in Vim. :) :) #blubvimmer
Not sure I've ever run into another person who admitted that publicly. Not that I think it's something that one should actually be ashamed of, it makes total sense. Just not a popular approach.
One of my professors did that with Excel. When I got my first job. I did that with Vim. 15m hacking on my .vimrc for every hour coding that first year I think. Time well spent years later. Thank you Bram.
RIP Bram, I have made a donation to ICCF Holland in memoriam.
Tangentially, is there any easy way to find out whom the black banner is for other than trial and error? Here I know because I searched for "died" on the front page and it brought me to this thread, but often I just find myself feeling a sense of dread at whom we've lost without being able to figure out who it actually is.
Farewell Bram!
For a while, until I get over this.
I've been teaching vim to hundreds of people and usually have about a dozen vim sessions open. So soon after Kevin, two names that are my heroes since the 90ies.
I still wonder about what I encountered in that moment - a kind of honesty and stubbornness to build something true, universal, empowering. The restraint and confidence it takes, then, to present it as a blank canvas for all to build on.
Because vim exists, I know it is possible to build in that spirit; I will always strive to do so myself.
(which rhymes in polish and means: one who have balls is using vim) RIP
My .vimrc is 25 years old :(
Eternal rest grant unto him. May perpetual light shine upon him.
It is a software that brings joy each time I use it.
I spent a lot of my career using various forks of vim as my primary editor, and still use it when I need to edit a file.
Thanks Bram! This world will miss you.
RIP and thank you. Thoughts are with his loved ones right now.
I guess he finally learnt how to exit vim
RIP, Bram.^[:x
:wq!
ZZ
VIM is still among my top used editors. And Bram was the one that made sure it kept improving and being useful for all those years, since I first used it on my Slackware install.
```gpt4.out
¶
Bram Moolenaar, gone,
VIM's mastermind fades to black,
:wq, his final song.
¶
In modes, he danced free,
Insert, normal, visual,
Code's choreography.
¶
H, J, K, L's guide,
Cursor moved, not the fingers,
His wisdom inside.
¶
Undo, redo, swap,
Infinite text maze tamed,
His legacy, non-stop.
¶
Bram's journey, :q! done,
Yet in each VIM keystroke,
His spirit lives on.
```
I only started vim a while ago but as I got used to it I could feel his vision on making a powerful text editor using only simple keybinds
It doesn't allow Ctrl+<AnyKey>
So I cant edit files using nano...
And that's when I started using Vim
RIP Bram
Thanks Bram!
Vim-In-Peace..
he finally figured out how to quit
The most programmer way to quit something. RIP
:'( RIP Bram
:wq!
R.I.P
From a man who use vim everyday.
Rest in peace Bram.
he had green squares until his death https://i.imgur.com/MrofIBq.png
RIP Legend :(
[Mods - Request for black bar, please]
It was the 'IRC style tutorial' ( https://www.vi-improved.org/irc-style-tutorial/ ) which helped make it click for me. (I feel like that was a lot longer ago than the publish date of 2016).
Vim is how I type. Vim is how I code. Vim is how I think.
Made a donation to ICCF in Bram's honour today. It will not be the last.
I never did. I hope I would have. :-(
RIP, mr Moolenar.
:qRIP Bram.
RIP Bram. Thank you for making our daily lives that much more enjoyable.
Moolenaar was an amazing programmer, and his impact will be long lasting. May he rest in peace.
Rest in peace, Bram.
Thank you Bram.
RIP.
[1] http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/doc/book/vimbook-OPL.pdf
[ There are only three names which have been deeply burned into my memory from splash screens; Bram Moolenaar from Vim, Sohrab Ismail-Beigi from Gravity Wars which I played as a kid https://archive.org/details/GravityWars_1020 ( https://ia802805.us.archive.org/16/items/5_Plus_One_-_Gunshi... )) and H. Peter Anvin from Linux boot screen / SYSLINUX https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3emX.jpg ]
Pioneered one of the most iconic pieces of software in history, and yet did not make a single dime from it. That is truly something to look up to.
Easily the most important piece of software I've ever used in my life, since it has allowed me to make a living.
RIP Bram Moolenaar.
Who would imagine a text editor could instill such a strong sense of identity into its users?
The first time I’ve been to SF I even got a “:w” tattooed on me.
Bram, you will be missed.
"Stichting ICCF Holland"
Is the name I search for.
I think the black stripe should be on HN today; it's quite justified.
It's perhaps my most important tool as an engineer. So much of its design is clear as the brainchild of Bram, so hearing this makes me sad. I hope Bram knew how many lives he touched.
My condolences to his family.
Thank you so much Bram!
:(
*I use vim on a daily basis and its very sad to see Bram go.
:cry:
RIP Bram Moolenaar
> What are some useful applications with Vim keybindings?
Thank you Bram for writing, maintaining, and improving vim over all these years.
it's weird because i don't know him, but his death absolutely hit me hard.
rest in peace <3
No feeble attempt at humour from me, just heartfelt sadness and gratitude.
I know there are a number of developers who regularly contribute and I hope they can continue developing for it.
Personally, I will archive Bram's last patch for posterity.
vim might seem small on the grand scheme of things (npi), but as an interface to almost anything on a computer and for so long.. it's a real wound to read this
saying this as a mostly emacser..
:T_T
@dang I know we don't see the black bar often but I hope it is possible
You'll be seeing it *much* more often in the coming years as those of the older generation -- who made such large contributions -- pass on.
worked with him ~decade ago.
this hits hard.
does anyone know if his family needs help/is there a way to help out? i would love to give back if possible.
Before that the project was "work with these 25 people and help them open each project and fix the broken paths interactively" (because servers changed).
The script ran at night and everyone's things "just worked" the next morning. It was glorious.
Thanks Bram.
Thank you for your humanitarian efforts, your generosity, and of course your genius. It is because of these traits that your loss, though I never knew you personally, hits so hard. RIP.
:wq!
to the bereaved, I send you my deepest condolences.
As others have said, time to make a donation in his honour.
I salute his contribution to craft and more so his contribution to humanity for support of ICCF. We all can and should follow his example in whatever way possible.
Thanks for vim, Bram, and rest in peace!
I enjoy typing 'vim' to start it up. I've created aliases for other programs, but not vim. 'v' would work quite well in my setup. I love those 3 letters.
And on an old programming forum (where I wrote all my posts with the Vimperator external editor feature -- in Vim, of course), so my signature went.. :wq
Of course, the truely old school will point out that vi doesn't have :x and that its vim that does. Thanks Bram.
WIll someone step up and continue to develop Vim, or it will fade away and Neovim take its place?
https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/c12e4eecbb26cedca96e0810d3...
You live as long as your contribution to the world, and you can rest assured that a large part of us will still be using modal editing in our mind-controlled VR spatial googles.
:wq
--
1: just this morning I was trying evil-mode once again...
I am by no means a Vim master, but Vim is virtually the ONLY text editor that I have been using since 2009. I typed my Ph.D. thesis (in Chinese!) and all of my papers/code using Vim.
Bram, thank you very much for this masterpiece. Thank you for making your masterpiece charityware, which has inspired me to do the same thing with my code.
R.I.P.
Some context: https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/ivkq22t3LQM
RIP, I've spent more time in Vim than any other software for sure, still use it to edit my journals and editing single files when needed.
What cause is that?
Huge respect.
Thank you so much for everything, and rest in peace.
It's probably my favourite piece of software. Where ever I go, whatever platform I use, whatever I write, I use Vim.
Bram's work has made my life better. This is sad news indeed. :(
Thank you Bram, and RIP.
We lost a good one today. My heartfelt condolences go out to his family through this difficult time. I hope they are honoured to know that his work had an impact on so many people's lives. What an enormous loss. Rest in peace, Bram Moolenaar.
Vim was born out of a simple system and a deep empathy and understanding of what a developer really needs.
In every line of code, every efficient series of keystrokes, his legacy endures. May it last forever. Rest in peace.
I once had a brief interaction with Bram. He clearly said, he didn't need any money and encouraged all donations to causes he cared about. In one case, $10,000 to Kilbale children center, he volunteered with.
You'll probably get emotional as I did if you click on this: https://github.com/brammool
Rest in peace, Bram; thank you for your work.
https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/6_yWxGhB_8I/m/ibserACY...
I didn't really know about him until I started reading about him in the comments to this post and wow, he seemed like a person I wish I could have known either as a friend or colleague or as a mentor or any combination thereof, seems we could all learn a bit from his example as it seems he remained cool under pressure and dedicated a lot of his time to vim the editor we all love.
Condolences to his family and friends and mates at Google.
I remember learning about the command line and having to use original vi. It was weird. But Bram saw some underlying genius in the tool and revived it. Not just for vim itself, but all the vims, all the tools that have vim bindings, etc.
Thank you, sir. <3 vim
Vim is a piece of software that has changed my life. Rest in peace, Bram, you will be missed. Condolences to Bram's family.
Can we please have a black banner?
:q
When I was first starting to learn vim I thought to myself who would go through all these troubles just to write some text on an editor when there are better alternatives out there but then I slowly started to understand how it really worked and how you can slowly craft it to your liking. Now, I spend almost 90% of my time in terminal and vim and can't see myself working without it.
Thank you Bram for playing a big part of my coding life through your contributions.
That was the first time I'd encountered charityware. Mind blowing tool, vim, and I am very impressed by him.
A legend of the field.
Huge, huge loss.
@dang can HN put a black banner for Bram Moolenaar please?
Just as Bram would want :)
Thank you Sir Moolenaar for this journey.
The email address I've used in the past has been responded to promptly, that's probably more effective than an @ mention:
hn@ycombinator.comThis is the passing of someone that has fundamentally touched the lives of so many programmers… his work is now part of our very folklore, we make vim jokes, we emulate it in other tools, even the “enemy” (eMacs) eventually added evil mode (mind my humour it has sharp edges)… vim is mentioned in science fiction and has survived the journey from Unix to a plethora of other operating systems…
He will be missed.
VIM is definitely is one of those thin tiles that keep Open Source together
:wq and RIP
iPlease![ESC]Vx1000000pIn short: he's such a lazy git with zero work ethnic.
RIP VIM
I didnt find much supporting what you claim. It's possible whatever your referring to was cleaned up. I only saw one apparently negative post, which was deleted or hidden.
I have been saddened more and more by platform after platform devolving into nonsensical bickering. I'm almost entirely off social media at this point for that reason.
Having said that, I feel it only makes it worse when people division out of proportion making hyperbolic and sweeping generalizations. I feel like being unrealistic about signal to noise ratio only empowers the trolls.
1000000iPlease!<Esc>:w will touch the file (update mtime) whether you've made changes or not
:x will only update mtime if the file contents are actually changed
Can confirm. I have accidentally typed :X many times, but have never accidentally encrypted a file
When I was first getting started in software I was very much part of the "I can think faster than I type" school and I had the good fortune to fall in with some really serious hackers, one of whom was an absolute wizard with `vim`.
He was a very humble guy, so it was some time before I learned he was in no small part such a `vi` pro because he had written a real vi, it was called `xvi` and I gather that it was around the time that `vim` was taking off.
I asked him why he used `vim` if he had written `xvi` and I'll never forget his reply: "Writing a `vi` is something any programmer can do if they put the effort in, writing a `vi` as good as `vim` is something only people like Bram can do. Obviously I'm going to use the better tool."
Bram changed the lives and careers of so many of us, myself included. I never interacted with him personally but from everything I've ever seen he was humble, brilliant, helpful, and took his craft as seriously as anyone I've ever heard of.
RIP Legend.
""" Happy New Year to all Vim users!
I have updated the handy desktop calendar for 2023. It prints on one sheet of paper and, after folding and applying a bit of glue, stands on your desk.
It is available in English and Dutch. You can find the PDF files on my website: https://moolenaar.net/#Calendar
Happy Vimming!
-- No man may purchase alcohol without written consent from his wife. [real standing law in Pennsylvania, United States of America] """
RIP Bram. Rest assured that us Vim users will be happy Vimming while being sad that you are gone.
True.
> [...] he was humble, brilliant, helpful, and took his craft as seriously as anyone I've ever heard of
I start to think that this is not a coincidence. These excellent people, the "brilliant, but humble" ones are the ones that changed my (and possibly others') lives and careers.
Mr Moolenaar, many other FOSS devs (maintainers), university professors (I'm sure I'm not the only lucky one who experienced this), all the real silent "rock stars".
I've seen too many people with big egos who stagnate as developers. They were the top of their class in school and were used to being the "smartest" in the room. When they start working, they often make a toxic work environment and can be a huge negative impact. Unfortunately their confidence makes them more appealing to the management and many are promoted to positions where they have even less reasons to listen to others "below them" and eventually stop improving
Those that are humble and eager to learn and work with others are a huge boost to the team. The mythical 10x programmer may not exist, but a single individual can certainly make a 10x team.
« I have been working for a company where quite a few managers, educated in physics and mechanics, thought the software was just the same as what they knew and they could decide how to make it. That company went downhill and was eventually taken over. The same happens in places where decision-makers can get away with failure, such as in government. The people writing the code probably just make sure they get paid and then run away from the crime scene. On the other end of the scale are people who want to write beautiful code, spend lots of time on it, and don’t care if it actually does what it was intended to do or what the budget was. Somewhere in between, there is a balance. »
I am not so sure about the last sentence. But the rest is SO true!
I’ve interacted with Bram a few times personally in the process of submitting changes to Vim, and I’ve observed many more interactions with others. I always had an immense amount of respect for the way he led the Vim project and interacted with the community. It is not uncommon to see open source software maintainers become burnt out or frustrated, particularly with a piece of software as quirky and complicated as Vim. But Bram was almost always respectful and patient with users and contributors, even when they were not.
This is a loss for the software world. Bram, you will be missed.
I was there as a volunteer staff, sitting at a reception desk. Although vim is the text editor I use everyday, I'm not that enthusiastic to participate the vim conference. I'm not a vim developer. I don't use some of the advanced vim features. I don't ask much for a text editor. I use vim simply because it's available in all environments I could possibly use. I was a volunteer staff because I was asked by one of my colleague at that time who was a serious vim user and organized the VimConf.
So I didn't have a plan to talk to Bram at all. There were so many Japanese vim developers and serious vim users there who want to talk to Bram. This may be the first and last chance to talk to Bram in person for them. I don't want to waste the precious time for them.
Then, I learned at the conference that recent vim release includes termdebug plugin which allows vim to behave as a gdb frontend. Since I am a C++ programmer, I started playing with it. Then, I quickly found a bug. termdebug assume there's only one function for a name and couldn't handle C++ function overloading.
I discussed this issue with Bram Moolenaar in a spare time.
There aren't many other things I can tell about Bram.
At the after party of VimConf 2018, Bram absolutely refused to use a cup and drink beer directly from a beer bottle. It wasn't a small 333 ml beer bottle. It was a big 633 ml beer bottle.
Before the VimConf 2018, Bram went to climb Mt. Fuji during his stay in Japan.
His website has a lot of other albums he published for everyone to enjoy: https://moolenaar.net/albums.html
As a remembrance of Bram and to thank him for building the editor I've been using for as long as I can remember, I'm doing exactly what he would have wanted me to do, donating to ICCF Holland. If you're a vim/nvim/other edition user, I suggest you to do the same: https://iccf-holland.org/donate.html
If you're a (neo)vim user, there is more information at `:help iccf` as well.
Thank you Bram for everything. I'm sure your spirit and lines written will stay with me and others for a very long time in the future.
Pioneered one of the most iconic pieces of software in history, and yet did not make a single dime from it. That is truly something to look up to.
Then, some time around 94 or so, I became aware of this vi clone called vim. My emacs envy could finally be put to rest because this vim could either do (or had on the roadmap to do) everything I had envied from looking over emacs users' shoulders! I became a rabid user and evangelist, immediately downloading each new version, reporting (and occasionally fixing) bugs. For a while when I was working at Sun in the late 90s, Bram and I had an ongoing email dialog.
My career path has never really allowed me to significantly work on open source, so I never really made the transition to a major contributor. Many years ago, vim hit peak feature set for me, so I didn't really need to track its development - the version bundled on my work desktop would always suffice and I'd download a new version at home whenever I changed out my home Windows PC. Other than that, I lost track of the community.
When I came to Google, I was tickled to find out that Bram worked here, though I never reached out to him personally. Before I knew it, he had retired, and I lost that chance.
For over 25 years, I have only ever used vim as my editor - at home or at work. It is the most dependable tool in my box, traveling with me through multiple employers and programming languages.
RIP Bram.
Thanks Bram, have a good afterlife.
The name Bram Moolenaar has hovered across all my work…
Thank you Mr. Moolenaar.
I had been joking on social media a few weeks ago that Vim must be "done" since patches stopped appearing about a month ago. Can't believe that the guy who created maybe the most important tool in my entire arsenal is gone.
> Keep me alive.[1]
[1] 10 Questions with Vim’s creator, Bram Moolenaar (2014) https://www.binpress.com/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-intervie...
"How many of you are mostly using Emacs?"
a bunch of raised hands
"Okay, we'll try to convert some people today!"
RIP, Bram Moolenaar
I used to use vim but lately I switched to Helix, which is basically vim but with all the good features and plugins built into it and without a configuration/extension language. Almost all of the features are easily discoverable by just pressing spacebar, and the rest by browsing the (small) documentation, and I can think of a way to do all the things Bram talks about from within Helix, often better (because it's relying on the language server).
Still, the main point about learning your tools by detecting inefficiencies and searching for a better way is always valid, and I'm sure that all these things Vim was already doing at the time helped pave the way for modern editors. RIP.
I can't quite remember what the relationship was but since then every time I use vim (not often admittedly ) I think of this Dutch woman looking after a jumble of wild animals in the middle of nowhere...
Thoughts are with his friends and family right now. Rest in peace, Mr. Moolenaar.
ZZ
I was also deeply honored to see my (tiny, insignificant) minority language on his page for the word Mooleenar in many languages [0].
As a matter of respect and to honour his memory, I will keep using the last version of vim (by his last commit [1]) as my main text editor for as long as humanly feasible.
[0] https://www.moolenaar.net/
[1] https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/4c0089d696b8d1d5dc40568f25...
Bram’s passing is another chip at the passing of the world I knew, where vim was new.
Thank you Bram for your excellent and enviable contribution to computing.
"It appears you think that everybody is like you. But that's not so."
I didn't take the advice well at the time, but now, a little older and wiser, I understand.
Thank you, Bram. Thank you for vim, for your time and dedication, and for taking the time to deposit a small amount of your wisdom into my brain. Sorry for being a dick.
Are you okay with sharing what it was about concretely? That may be more of a takeaway, to learn in which way people aren't all alike, than the general statement that not everyone's the same
We couldn't come to an agreement on how to implement it in the most robust way... meanwhile over at neovim a PR was submitted and merged, and a backwards-compatible solution provided within 3 days of me filing an issue. :-)
It started in my senior year as a CS student - in an operating systems course, we were introduced to a lot of linux stuff and the professor taught Vim as part of his course. At first I rebelled. I chose to develop most of my projects in eclipse/Java at that point and had developed an aversion to the command line. That, plus Vim's learning curve made me hate it at first.
Fast forward a year at my first job at an embedded systems shop writing in pure C, all the vets used vim and I saw how fast they were with it and it made me want to learn. I think my first "aha!" moment was when I accidentally entered visual mode and prepended several lines at once with a comment. After that I was hooked, and while I'm typically one of the only ones using pure vim on any team I'm on, inevitably after a year or so at the job people see how I use it and start asking about it.
Thank you Bram for the work you put into Vim!
It's weird but coding in vim is going to take on a new significance now. Each keystroke, somehow saluting him.
Very sad....
I think we definitely need the black navbar of mourning.
Like there should be an open source lifetime achievement award or something. Like the academy awards.
That’s very good to hear. I donated, but not very much – I assumed that their money would end up going to the wrong places. How did Bram manage to avoid this?
From the LICENSE (https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/uganda.html#license):
> Compared with other organizations that do child sponsorship the amounts are very low. This is because the money goes directly to the centre. Less than 5% is used for administration. This is possible because this is a small organization that works with volunteers. [...]
> How do you know that the money will be spent right? First of all you have my personal guarantee as the author of Vim. I trust the people that are working at the centre, I know them personally. Further more, the centre has been co-sponsored and inspected by World Vision, Save the Children Fund and is now under the supervision of Pacific Academy Outreach Society. The centre is visited about once a year to check the progress (at our own cost). I have visited the centre myself many times, starting in 1993. The visit reports are on the ICCF web site.
From KCFs perspective where I worked, during my time there, I fundraised my salary (expenses) personally “door to door” to keep any funds donated to the organization going direct to the kids and community. I understood this was the case for others as well. I believe Bram paid for flights out of his own pocket.
There was a funny React framework a while back that has all kinds of cool state management and this and that, but it renders nothing. For the developers who spend more time theorizing, migrating, refactoring, than shipping.
It's funny when people go back and forth about the time complexity of a click handler (that is debounced anyway), and they arrive at the optimal solution, but when you use the app the entire thing is super clunky lol where is the concern for time complexity of me using the product xD
This is the modern software world in a nutshell.
They were a photocopier company that struggled with technology in general, not just software. I suspect the root of their problem was that they had been taken over by sales and marketing people. That's never good for a technology company.
For ease of consumption, the context again:
> On the other end of the scale are people who want to write beautiful code, spend lots of time on it, and don’t care if it actually does what it was intended to do or what the budget was. Somewhere in between, there is a balance.
Obviously, Bram, or Linus, or Stallman, and many other devs I don’t even know, are not there for delivering half-baked pieces of art. And that’s eventually a GOOD thing. [the counterpart being that the dedication level is MUCH beyond the one in professional environments]
This photo remembers me a funny discussion at that time.
One of the participants said he use vim to write .emacs file.
"Why don't you use Emacs for that?" I asked.
"Because if I have to edit .emacs, that means emacs isn't configured the way I liked it. So I use vim in that case"
Thank you for sharing.
The number of people who spent that much time working on Open Source is very small, and the number of people who have spent that much time purely in their spare time is smaller still. In fact, I don't really know of anyone who even comes close to Bram.
The number of people who spent this much time volunteering for anything is very small.
Bram's effort on Vim was phenomenal and exceptional by any standard.
---
I only met Bram in person once, in 2014, when he talked about Zimbu[1]; at some point I must have given a bit of a skeptical look, and he promptly looked at me and asked "oh, you don't agree? Why not?" It was a nice talk with lots of "audience engagement" like this. We spent some time talking during the rest of the day and the next day; we discussed and joked about lots of things; I don't recall talking much about Vim: it just didn't come up. I found him a very friendly, warm, and likeable person.
Sven Guckes (who passed away last year) did organize a little "Ask Me Anything" type workshop with Bram, and I discovered Bram struggled remembering the ins-and-outs of some of the lesser used Vim features just as much as the rest of us :-)
Vim was one of the first pieces of software I learned when I switched to Linux in college. It was tricky at first, then it delighted me to no end. It remains a daily part of my life nearly 20 years later, and I'm still learning more about it every single year.
I can't count the number of times I wish I could drop out of insert mode in normal web browser text boxes.
Bram's insistence of donating his earnings to helping the children of Uganda is also incredibly selfless, and it's impossible to mention him without bringing this up [1].
We'll miss you Bram. We'll be learning from you for decades to come.
I agree, but the fact that there's a non-zero amount of people doing it shouldn't be overlooked. For example maintainer of qutebrowser (who also happen to be in pytest core team) and apart from a teaching job at an university a couple of months per year, he's working full time on OSS. The main characteristics they share (at least those I met) seem to be a deep love for the craft, a deep love for people, and be virtually unfazed by the amount of money they can make if they weren't doing that.
I started as a Unix sysadmin 25 years ago and kept gravitating towards vim. One practical reason is because it paid off to be familiar with vi, which is nearly always still available on just-installed or bare-bones systems. But another is how welcoming and leveling the Vim community was. It was so easy to get great macros and tips, and everyone was just super friendly about it. I remember someone in #vim irc teaching me "gqap" to wrap a paragraph, and they very naturally took the time to explain how it all worked. There was no sneering on from the community. I think Bram's empathy and leadership was a huge part of that attitude in the community.
I'm a regular annual donor on Vim's behalf, and this morning donated another €250 in Bram's memory. People should only donate what they can afford, we all have different means, but I'd encourage folks to work out what a great commercial editor or IDE would have cost them in licensing over their use time, and to consider donating in proportion.
:wq Bram
For most death announcements on HN, I have to look up who they were. Not this one. I greatly appreciate his work and contributions to the world.
All the stray 'i's in documents or source code in stuff I had to write with other editors give evidence to my dedication. Thank you Bram! May you live forever in vim.
Vim has shaped so many aspects of my professional life; I'll forever be grateful to Bram for his work and contributions. Rest in peace, Bram.
In view of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-ki...
I'm calling out that I have donated.
Edit: Hmm... PayPal seems to throw error after error at me when I try to donate. I'll keep trying.
Rest in Peace, Bram.
You can, if you really want to:
I don't really want to discus this in detail here as it's not the right location, but I think lots of people would be interested in continuing Vim, rather than having Vim being subsumed by Neovim. We'll have to see how things and the relationship between Vim and Neovim change and evolve in the coming weeks and months.
I have a weaker assumption - somebody will keep maintaining it, but active feature development is in question.
Do you think I went through and counted everything? No, the app I use just tells me the total points and comment count for users. Does that really make me a stalker?
> Do you work in law enforcement or have a need to control people?
What an utter waste of words.
> Or is this your other account?
Not quite sure what this is supposed to mean. Are you accusing me being the other guy's alt? What would the point of that even be?
Not enterprise: event --> action.
Enterprise: event --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> action_parta --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> action_partb abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> action_finalizer.
Source: seeing it from the inside.
(I'm only half joking. A system that's always ten times slower than the optimal solution, can still be beneficial to one that's quadratically slower than the optimal solution. Or it can be worse, it depends on how big your instances are.)
Your abstractions might change in a way that they break your tests in a major way, and not only do you end up re-writing a great part of your code but also of your test set.
Suppose you use TDD to write a function that adds positive integer together. You get it working for add(0, 0), and nothing else. Then add(0, 1), and add(1, 0) and so on. So you have all these cases. The function is just switching on combinations of inputs, branching to a case, and returning a literal constant for that case.
After writing a few hundred of these cases you say, to hell with this nonsense, and refactor the function to actually add the f.f.fine numbers together.
Now you have two, maybe three problems:
1. Almost all the tests still pass, but most of them are uselessly uninformative.
2. Almost all, because you made a typo in the add(13, 13) test case such that it required the answer 28 to pass, and that's what you did in the code; the real code correctly puts out 26, requiring the test to be fixed.
2. The function adds together combinations that are not tested, just fine, but you can no longer have the function fail for hitherto untested inputs, and then make the test pass. You can no longer "do the TDD thing" on it.
TDD is just a crutch that has to fall out the way when a developer with two brain cells together implements a general algorithm that makes all possible inputs work.
At the same time, that crutch is pretty good for systems that fundamentally are just collections of oddball cases that won't generalize. As a rule of thumb, if there is no obvious way to refactor the code, then TDD is likely continuing to provide value in the sense that the tests are protecting important properties in what has been implemented, against breakage.