real programmers

Xkcd_programmers
In addition to being really funny, the latest xkcd is rather timely.

I was a vi or vim guy when I needed to use a text editor (that’s how I did most of the original WWdN updates, via ssh back in the old days,) and my standard line to give emacs fanboys was, "Emacs? Yeah, I’ve tried to use it, but I could never find the text editor."

Then we’d go back to arguing about stuff that really mattered, like which captain was better.

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28 thoughts on “real programmers”

  2. Regarding Captains…
    Overheard in a bookstore yesterday:
    “…and then he said, “I’d never let a kid on MY bridge?”
    “Well, that attitude is prolly why J.J. won’t let him be in the new movie.”

  5. Check out the alt tag on the xkcd image — it’s at least as funny as the actual comic itself.
    I use vim for everything written; I may then take what I write and format it in a word processor or DTP program, but I find I can type close to as fast as I think only when I do so without the distractions most modern editors provide.

  6. My friends and I tend to derail these conversations by flashing editor gang signs. The VI one is made by holding your ring finger down with your thumb so that the three fingers left form “VI”. No one is ever pedantic enough to talk about the merits of modal vs control key editors after three people have simultaneously flashed them the VI gang sign and called out “VI represent, yo!”

  7. REAL programmers can still code a relational database all in zeros because the company he/she works for is in serious cutback mode and won’t let programmers use ones as they’re in short supply.

  8. …oh, and, uh, KarenByNight? That is also known as “The Shocker”. Might want to keep that one on the DL in certain conversations.

  9. The mouseover text made that one for me. So funny.
    P.S. Having been listening to your Last.fm radio station, I can only conclude you have been stalking my husband and sneaking his cds out of the house to rip them in the middle of the night.

  10. One of the pranks I used to play on the other sysadmin was to edit their account and change their shell to emacs. Of course emacs allows you to execute shell commands so they could fix it, if they knew the emacs commands…

  12. Vi is for pussies 🙂
    Did you know emacs keystrokes are universally available in Mac OS X? Even it a text area in Safari, you can hit ctrl-A to go to the beginning of a line, ctrl-E to go to the end, etc.
    Actually I use both, since most linux installations only have vi by default. Also, emacs is too big to fit on Linux devices I use like a Buffalo Terastation, OLPC laptop, and a GP2X.

  13. @jslicer: “The Shocker” leaves the index finger and middle finger together, while the “VI” sign would spread them apart to create the “V”. An important difference. 🙂 (I believe the VI sign is also a hand signal at Arizona State University for something or other.)

  16. Wil, responding to your Twitter about Lego Star Wars. Do it for the Xbox. The DS version still has bugs, even in the Complete Saga edition. My kids love it on the Wii.

  17. I use nano (and pico before that) when I use Linux at all. And you know what? I’m okay with my total lack of alpha-geekness.
    No, I’m not a “real” programmer – I finish my projects before they’re obsolete. 😉

  18. I use Nano too. The only people I know who use vi and emacs are people who started coding years ago and those were the only editors you could find consistently on your server.
    Anyone learning vi or emacs now is just wasting time, time they could be using to you know, write code.

  19. Anyone learning vi or emacs now is just wasting time, time they could be using to you know, write code.
    True dat, as they say.
    I feel this way about doing a lot of complex coding of my own on my blog or blog-related databases. Time I spend doing that is time I could spend, you know, creative writing.

  20. Having used paper tape, punch cards, line editors of several flavors, vi, emacs, etc. I found the absolute best programming environment evah was the Symbolics Lisp Machine. It did anything and everything. Common Lisp + Flavors + Symbolics = CompGeek Heaven.
    Oh, and I’ve had to write programs in machine code. Somewhere I have a jump ruler I made for PDP-11 code – 1 inch = 5 words.

  23. having tested nroff and troff for 0.4 unix beta on a pdp11 in berkeley in 79, I am a die-hard vi user.
    go, go geekhood,
    zz

  24. nano is nice for light-weight editing, like system files and such. I also use it as my e-mail editor. With nano installed on the machine I never have to touch vi, which gives me hives. I’ve never been able to figure out the logic of its commands.
    For real programming, I use emacs. Large and complicated, yes, but I’m used to the way that it has hooks for showing matching grouping symbols and syntax highlighting for C code.
    I did actually once set it up so that emacs was my login shell (mostly to be able to claim the corresponding Geek Code tag). There are several things that are then difficult to do, so I abandoned it.

  25. Hey Wil –
    As a fellow vim user, when I encountered people that tried to convert me to emacs I use the line my programming teacher share with me:
    “Emacs? Sure, I’ve used it. Its a wonderful operating system, all it lacks is a good text editor.”

  26. @Mike Cohen
    For emacs on OLPC:
    yum install emacs-nox
    It fits just fine.
    I also installed vim-enhanced. I’m ambidextrous or perverse or something.

  27. @ kaellinn18 and jslicer-
    The VI handsign is also the Trident of Sparky the Sun Devil of Arizona State University. If you were to do that anywhere near Tempe, Arizona or near ASU’s rival school(s) and proclaim something about VI, you would get some funny looks.
    /Has a lot of ASU alumni on family tree.
    //Got some “shocked” expressions for using the trident out of state.

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