dfrunza

I tried to switch to other editors several times, but couldn't make the transitions for several reasons: ) My editing workflow now is tightly tied to Vim, for example the normal/insert mode paradigm. ) The capability to navigate using hjkl is helping with my RSI condition, because I find that it helps to offload some of the workload on the wrist of the right hand. When editing in Vim, as compared to other traditional editors, my hands get less tired. *) Other editors have their own quircks, and I don't want to spend yet another number of years to adjust.

I've decided that the next time I switch to an editor, it's going to be to one written by myself.

I use Vim to code, but it took me a lot of time to find to configure it. My primary need when coding is quick jump to symbol definition, and after many trial and error attempts, settled on the plugins `vimprj` and `indexer` in combination with Universal Ctags. Have been using this setup for years and it's proven to be stable and giving me the result I need.

But I hate Vim.

It's so fragile. Configuring it is a nightmare. One buggy plugin could cause weird behaviour in the editor, and I'd had a hard time figuring out why.

In a recent incident of this kind, I noticed that the scrolling of syntax highlihted code became horribly slow, and the cause turned out to be the new regex engine of Vim 8.

So I've compiled Vim 7.4 from scratch, and intend on using that version till the end of time. By the way - my plugins are manually installed and I never upgrade them. Ever.

Programs to read ... first entry 'JavaUnit'.. SKIP!

> ...because we have a lot more RAM and processing power than we used to.

I don't know about you, but I haven't noticed any dramatic increase in performance - if anything - apps are slower and consume ridiculous amounts of RAM. At work I'm using PyCharm (written in Java) and somehow it's "normal" for it to consume 1Gb of memory. Now if every app would be free to use memory like that, then I wouldn't be able to run more than 8 apps on my computer.

For all the 'memory safety' and 'exception' features that Java has, in my experience - and that includes the time spent with PyCharm too - Java apps are more unstable. Sometimes the JVM downright crashes, or angrily throws a nasty exception, leaving me perplexed as to what happened and worried whether I should restart the app or not.

I don't see a reason why a program like PyCharm couldn't have been written in C. 'It's too low-level' is the common answer - I don't think so; the real reason is probably along the lines of 'I don't want to deal with manual memory management and pointers, and since there's plenty of languages that do that for me - I'll use that!'. C is bare-bones - and that's a virtue - because the programmer is in charge. Every single aspect of the program is a consequence of his decisions. It also removes the opaque 'middle layer' of cruft, like garbage collector and standard libraries.

C is the best language out there, in my opinion, sitting in the nice spot between assembly and higher-level languages. I wish there was a successor of C, which would have carried its philosophy into the 21st century (and no - I'm not talking about the abomination that is C++).