On Sat, 19 Feb 2000, Olaf Seibert wrote:

> Any reason not to just use Vim

uhm,.. hmm.

in general, when one sits down at a Unix and it does something
``unusual'', one becomes not merely annoyed, but angry.  one wants to
stand up, throw the evil thing out the window, and go back home to Real
Unix.  ``and then i pressed delete, and it said `terminated with signal
15.' so i threw a vt220 in the trunk, drove straight to mountain view, and
demanded at SGI's front desk, `who is responsible for this?'  and their
receptionist-supermodel kindly lead me to the right cube out in the
warehouse.
``okay, you.  Press delete.  Go ahead, i brought this terminal all the way
to your office.  see that key with the X inside the arrow?  just like an
old typewriter?  press it.  are you deaf?  press the stupid key!
``what's that I see?  ^? is it?  Yeah, that's right, it's the DELETE key,
and it generates a DELETE character.  Pretty amazing, huh?  I guess you
didn't know that, did you?
``Oh, you _did_ know!  Well then why--''
``We thought--''
``You thought what?  You _thought_?  You, don't think.  You make your box,
work with this box!  I don't have time for your fancyass gratuitously
innovative bullshit.  Plug. Type. Who do you people think you are? You
think you're above the ASCII standard?  You think you can change the
keyboard on a vt220?  I asked your stupid little glitzy toy movieOS for a
vt220 terminal emulation, and, damnit, that's what I want to get!  What is
so, so difficult about that?  How much do I have to _pay_ you people
before you give me _Unix_ instead of some foolish emerald city 
operating system that comes on fancy pink designer CD's?  Here's twenty
bucks. Go see the Wizard, and buy yourself a brain.''

AIX, in spite of having lots of good code in it (hash tables for certain
VM structures, is that true?!), is consistently and obnoxiously arrogant
enough to change and break things that worked just fine to begin with.
Consequently, everyone hates it.  partly because it has a learning curve,
but partly because their whole attitude stinks.  they are Just A Vendor,
and it's none of their business to go re-inventing things.  but they seem
to think they're better than everyone else.  they seem to think they have
the right, the authority, the justification, the _mandate_ to change Unix
and yet keep calling it Unix.  it's not bad code, so much as that they're
obnoxiously arrogant _little_ bad people.  the fscap people.  the people
who turned lpr into some crazy whacked-out AS/400 batch job processing
system, when all i want to do is _print_.  can i have a 'man' page please?
oh, you've _transcended_ man, have you.  Well, good for you.  Does 'man'
still work?  Well, why not?  oh, it wasn't graphical.  WASN'T GRAPHICAL?!
It's _UNIX_!

i haven't cought vim doing anything this blatant yet, but there have been
several moments when i mashed the keyboard by accident and some menued
fairyland popped up, and i found myself typing one-handed and reaching for
a brick before the menuhell dissappeared just in time.  i don't trust you
guys any farther than i can throw those giant vim binaries.

vim is good.  i understand that people who like vim, like vim.  please
don't take this as an insult--i'm merely taking advantage of the
opportunity to make fun of a bunch of _other_ people.  and, i guess i just
don't think it's proper for us to hand vim to people when they asked for
vi.  if people want vim, they'll ask for vim.  they'll type 'vim' at the
prompt.  vim is not vi any more.  it's not!  it's like giving people
xemacs when they asked for emacs, or some translucent pamela anderson
eterm when they asked for ``an xterm.''

can you put your dirty underwear back in the drawer and wipe off your
keyboard before you ask me to edit config files for you, please?
``but, this is better than an xterm.  it's a superset of xterm!'' 
yeah, sure it is--bite me.

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:+1 720 841-8308 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US