I thought we moved on from this kind of dogmatic, limited perspective "wisdom". But I guess not?

A Soviet moving castle made from Volkswagen Beetles

e: (my only real experience with java is spring boot)

Sorry but the down turn in the job market is real and absolutely worst then people on this website want to realize. most are struggling, juniors especially. The attitude of young people have nothing to do with that.

> The attitude of young people have nothing to do with that.

“Whither are the manly vigour and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt…”

Letter in Town and Country magazine republished in Paris Fashion: A Cultural History 1771

For me, the issue isn't that I'm unwilling to learn new things. It's that I cannot use these keybindings anywhere else. Almost all online editors and workstations have some sort of vim keybindings. When I ssh into a Linux machine I can trust it has vim editor. It's like qwerty keyboard, I'm sure that there's better layouts but I just cannot discard the flexibility of being able to jump on most machines and be 99% productive almost instantly.

> I just cannot discard the flexibility of being able to jump on most machines and be 99% productive almost instantly.

You can easily discard it if you can become 200% productive with better defaults on your machine. Like, do you also not use any plugins just because they aren't available on another machine?

Also the keyboard comparison doesn't work since it's not as hard to copy your editor to another machine

> do you also not use any plugins just because they aren't available on another machine?

The vast majority of plugins don't fundamentally change how you interact with text.

So? Narrow it down to the most useful minority that do, the question still remains

If you narrow it down to that minority that fundamentally changes how you interact with text, then I think the answer is a pretty easy "Yes".

Honestly, I don't think this is a big deal. I use helix as my primary editor, but when I'm on another machine and it only has vi or whatever I just use that and I can mentally switch to using the vim keybinds with little issue. Like sometimes I'll mistakenly `m-i-w-c` instead of `c-i-w` or `d` instead of `x`, but then I just hit `u` and continue.

To anti-pile-on to the other replies - this is exactly why I haven't given it much of a spin.

I'm glad to find out about evil-helix.

i didn't find it to be a big issue because helix doesn't have different key bindings as much as it simply has a reverse grammar. If you think of vim as a language to manipulate text objects (which is what it is basically) everything is verb-noun, in helix it's noun-verb. There's a few idiosyncrasies but approaching it that way I got around pretty much immediately.

I'm not so sure. You'd still need to figure out how to find and attract the people you want to be around while keeping the people you don't want out. Itd probably be easier to keep trying different avenues until you find a group you vibe with

Finally the treadmill of endlessly reinventing JavaScript frameworks and libraries is available for us Joe Schmoes too.

"clever" is objective and cultural. Some people will say ternary operators are overly clever. Other will say OOP patterns are overly clever. It depends on what paradigms and patterns you're used to.

Some of the best programmers I know are competent, smart, and well adjusted people who chose this career and put in the work because of the demand. Some will tell you they don't even like programming. And some of the worst programmers I know are the type who centered their image and self esteem around being a true hobbyist.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with really liking, say, photography and looking around and saying “Nope, unless I basically win the lottery there’s not a lot of money in that and most of the jobs are actually pretty boring.”

Some people here probably disagree but nothing wrong with picking something you’re OK with, pays well, and you’re competent at.

...but you can't overwork them to the point of burnout and then replace them the next round of rubes.

YC and their startups were big perpetrators of the practice and spurred the trend further in software. I'm getting old so I was around for the late 2000's; YC used to con impressionable youths HARD. pg's cult of personality, his bad book, etc... it was all to get smart and passionate kids to overwork for him.

Blaming the bad market on AI is a marketing ploy pushed by AI startups to try to overstate the "AI revolution" and conveniently their companies.

I’m sure it’s also a ploy by C suite leadership to explain/justify whatever they want (layoffs, price hikes, budget cuts, et al.)

For people working web dev over multiple stacks and tech, emacs cannot compete with vscode, full stop. People don't use vscode because it's snappy or hip or cool or the best or whatever (because it's not), they do it because you can quickly and painlessly set things up with it's gigantic ecosystem of plugin and libraries. You could give me a new machine and I would have it up and running for a modern stack (django, nuxt, vue, python, Typescript, postgres, AWS, git) in less than a day a way that emacs could not. Emacs has strengths and uses, but a vscode replacement it is not

How about zed?

Zed is snappy, but it also doesn’t have a rich plugin ecosystem yet.

In that way it’s much like Vim, Emacs, Helix: powertools that need a lot of configuring.