Just Because Its New Doesn't Mean Its Good (neovim) | Prime Reacts

[@MichaelCampbell01]

There's 2 types of fools in the world; one says "this is old and therefor good"; the other says "this is new and therefor better"

[@perseussmith3274]

There's actually a third type of fools; those who write " therefor" instead of "therefore".

[@mfahz4067]

@perseussmith3274 There's actually a fourth type of fool: the soydev who bickers about the most insignificant things

[@DarthVader11912]

​@perseussmith3274😂😂😂

[@Akio-fy7ep]

@perseussmith3274 Then, the ones who say "actually" a lot.

[@Issou-r8r]

Found the enlightened centrist

[@d.wolfin152]

I have an incredible joke about UDP, but you might not get it.

[@barongerhardt]

ACK OOPS

[@solomonbestz]

😂😂😂 it dropped along the way

[@darukutsu]

don't worry it'll be QUIC

[@o0alanjack0o]

Please type properly, you have an incredible what about what?

[@hedwig7s]

I have a great joke about TCP: What? You didn't get it? Let me try again great I joke have a TCP: about What do you mean it's out of order? Alright one more try: I a joke TC You know what? I give up you won't get it

[@IlyesSem]

Why don't you use X ? Because I use Wayland

[@leonthayne]

Why don't you use Whyland?

[@zperk13]

Because Elon sucks

[@RobertFletcherOBE]

"because wayland broke it" is the correct answer

[@monad_tcp]

Wayland ACTUALLY works now. I was surprised that I was able to make a RTX3060 work on Linux, sure it was Fedora that forces Wayland on you, and I had to compile the driver. Yes, not only nVidia open sourced their driver (none of that noveau french bullshit), it actually worked. With Cuda even. 2024, finally, a step closer to the year of linux on desktop. XServer died finnaly, you can run a system with no X at all. Also, no stupid KMS , what is this 1990s ? GPUs don't even have real text buffers anymore, its all faked. Its all DRI baby !

[@leonthayne]

@@monad_tcp My dell latitude 7280 runs wayland. X is still nice though for compatibility with lesser supported packages.

[@RadityaRasyid-ym2nx]

"Old does not mean dead, new does not mean best." -Slipknot, All out Life

[@heavymetalmixer91]

Completely true.

[@rawallon]

cray cray

[@dotmavriq]

I'M TIRED OF BEING RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING I'VE SAID

[@RadityaRasyid-ym2nx]

@@dotmavriq 🤘

[@namesas]

Hell yeah based

[@MorningNapalm]

From my perspective, Jonathan Blow's argument is about 50:50 right and wrong. And in my experience, this is fairly typical for his arguments. He often forces arguments into such odd shapes that the conclusions he makes are barely valid. Like when he said that improving on things over time is enshittification and vim is new. Newer than vi, sure, but Emacs is also not the same as it used to be.

[@brunomello7499]

exactly. He usually starts with a good point and then it's just downhill from that

[@shadowseek27]

@@brunomello7499 i think he needs to boil down his argument to "i like it more", because literally no one can argue against that, and it fulfills all his weird criteria

[@kingradical-x]

Okay, I'm so glad I read down these comments. I thought I was just dumb.

[@abc32167]

0:30 - this is the most annoying form of question 3:30 - chat: "why don't he just use Linux"

[@neruneri]

The Web Dev minds cannot comprehend the horrors of being a game dev

[@mikkurogue]

@@neruneri the webdev mind is one of nothing but node_modules and "chat gippity pls give me boilerplate for my component its too hard for me :("

[@freezingCode]

@@mikkurogue webdev here, can confirm

[@Heater-v1.0.0]

Jeez, bloody, what? It's 2025 and here you are still having editor wars? For God sake.

[@IQof2]

2025? The year of the Linux desktop?

[@ProfShibe]

For real. Long live nano!

[@voidwalker7774]

@@ProfShibe Bro!!! Helix, is the best!

[@barongerhardt]

Longer wars have been fought for so much less.

[@Jh_93641]

There will be a quelling as the machine war approaches. Emac and vim users will unite to defeat gpt10. Although i could see text editors becoming more of a relic, as compute will be outlawed, a position the rebellion supports, due to the machines being able to smell it.

[@rmidifferent8906]

The big issue is that you don't know whether the project is an upgrade or just fashion tech before you do it. Also you will think that the project is just stupid fashion if you have never tried it. I think that's why the argument misses. He basically says "things I don't like or don't know are just stupid fashion tech while things I like are good and forward the field". There is nothing wrong with sitting with what you like and not trying everything, but dismissing all of it as fashion tech is ignorant. There is one thing worse though - trying to push your preferences onto others. It's good to have a discussion but sometimes you like what you like and others like other things

[@OzoneBhattarai-lm2es]

Prime tried so hard to agree with j blow, but jblow kept making things worse lmao

[@CatFace8885]

He really did, jblow has so much good experience yet still has L takes

[@mobugs]

of note is that jblow barely uses any editor features if any: very minimal syntax highlighting, no auto format, no autocompletion... these are the things i think he is talking about when he says 'adding complexity' not "being newer"

[@Dangerdad137]

I was a UC Berekeley undergrad when Jon Blow was there in the early 90s. Fun fact -- most of the development machines used JOVE (a trimmed-down version of emacs). There was little choice back then what to use. I shifted to Vim in the late 90s because of RSI in my wrists from chording.

[@xpusostomos]

Hmm... But I would argue you'd press a lot more buttons in vi to get the same thing done

[@DeviRuto]

@@xpusostomos it's more about having to stretch your pinky all the time. Emacs relies too much on the Ctrl key. 10 keystrokes in the home row are less destructive than ctrl+shift+alt+meta+hyper+z

[@CyborusYT]

"hate to break it to you but almost none of the world is functional" ha.... this has multiple meanings

[@soulextracter]

Subtle as a sledgehammer! Not wrong though.

[@skilz8098]

Sure, it may not be functional, but there's more observational evidence that points to being fully dysfunctional.

[@ktktktktktktkt]

"Just Because Its New Doesn't Mean Its Good" That's exactly what I think about my wife's new boyfriend.

[@faridguzman91]

lmfao sad

[@alst4817]

Your wife says hi, by the way.

[@anonymous49125]

I mean... it's not always true. Tell Sharon I said hi!

[@xpusostomos]

You preferred her old boyfriend?

[@dataolle]

ed. ed is the standard editor. emacsitor and viitor aren't even words. ed.

[@codeman99-dev]

I still have "Actually using ed" bookmarked. Read it at least twice a year.

[@craigdanielmaceacher]

The wheel isn’t being “reinvented”, it’s being improved! Who makes the argument that wooden carriage wheels were enough? Well what about stone wheels? Radical departures fail much more than incremental improvements, which is what Neovim is.

[@DeviRuto]

i kinda love the collective hallucination we all have that stone wheels were ever a thing. our society is shaped by cartoons

[@matthewhelsley2840]

Blow calling Vim a "new" thing is pretty absurd. By that thinking he just released Braid 5 minutes ago so why has he moved on to writing other games so soon? It just seems very disingenuous to dismissively say "Vim is new".

[@jamescritchlow3445]

Dude, I hate it when someone says, "I've been programming for 40 years," as an excuse to either not try something new or to brush aside your advice. It's like doctors in the 1800s saying, "I don't need to wash my hands before surgery. I've been a doctor for 40 years."

[@lializ_666]

I don't think it's a good metaphor, but for sure is a fun one

[@Majiger]

Agreed, but I think the reasoning he brought up "age" is to say "Do you think I just randomly picked a thing from a hat and decided on it?" but obviously without any actual context.

[@AlexMax2742]

Even if you HAVE programmed for 40 years and subscribe to that advice, there's a lot more tactful ways to respond. What's wrong with. "I haven't tried it because what I have works for me, and there's nothing really pushing me to try something new."

[@kaiser2261]

@@AlexMax2742part of it is that its in response to the hordes of college kids on twitter that are in their 2nd semester of comp sci and asking these questions

[@skilz8098]

Better yet is the words of Wisdom from Solomon himself: "There's nothing new under the sun", and, "it's all vanity".

[@D0Samp]

Pico and GNU Nano are a reasonable subset of the Emacs editor experience that decently do what they're originally designed to do, editing emails and plain text documents.

[@cubemaster1298]

I always use Micro to edit .conf files when installing a Linux system.

[@xpusostomos]

I never saw any similarity between nano and Emacs. If you really must have a basic Emacs, there is "mg", but for the most part i don't see the point.

[@codeman99-dev]

My Dude! I used GNU nano as my primary editor for years. I will admit, if you're in a language that needs the LSP, then you're in the wrong place. On the other hand, there's plenty of power in GNU nano for a lot more than people give it credit for. It takes 3-20 minutes to configure. Syntax support. Position history. Automatic backups. Powerful search. Plenty of jumping motions. Command execution. Help text that's actually useful.

[@Sub0x-x40]

@@cubemaster1298 i used micro for a while, but now im kinda good at nvim so use that, but micro is awesome!

[@Sub0x-x40]

@@codeman99-dev yeh i watch a guy on here using nano to code in c and its literally the most vanilla nano on the most vanilla mac not a single thing has been altered not even the godamn wallpaper and its awesome

[@kyleheaney3734]

Just wanna say I love your videos bro, struggle with addiction myself but am a self taught developer from a young age but in my early 20s and struggling but you're bringing the motivation back so I appreciate you

[@soroushjm1011]

❤❤

[@AshesWake-sf7uw]

His streams were actually useful during my interview lmao, love watching him now

[@kakwa]

While it's always fun to troll about editors, in truth I could not care less about which editor my colleagues are using. Heck, one of the best dev I know uses freaking Gedit.

[@ficolas2]

No fucking way

[@whette_fahrtz]

based

[@xpusostomos]

I'd rather hire someone who mastered some IDE than gedit

[@YaroslavFedevych]

Gedit is not that bad. I want to switch to Kate, but I’m on mac half of the time.

[@theherk]

Everything that comes out of JB’s mouth is bespoke to vexing some crowd. He is ragebait incarnate.

[@skilz8098]

He's great and all, and is really good at what he does, and he does know his shit, but still kind of a pushover as compared to me... why, how? They haven't met me yet! I'll tell them that you can divide by 0 and that's it's not an exception and that we've been treating it all wrong. I'll challenge the very status quo. What I know and understand is that when someone else instantly regurgitates that it's undefined simply because that's what we've all been forced taught... That's narrow-minded thinking. No, just no. You just don't understand it, and have been practically brainwashed into thinking into that kind of mindset, world view, mind hive since you stopped sucking on a pacifier. That's a limitation that I'll never impose onto my intellect for it knows no bounds. I see and understand things that many cannot fathom or comprehend.

[@itztlacoliuhqui]

??

[@_m-d-nabeel]

??

[@anonymous49125]

One even more aggravating question is: "why would you even want to do that?" especially on forums where you have a really specific issue and it's the only reply, and even more so when it's the top search result when googling said issue. Best thing is, you can say this to any technical question ever and it is equally as applicable. People do it to feel smart without actually having to answer let alone understand the question being asked. "How can I change a drive letter without getting an error BCD corrupted 0x0000098?"=>"why would you even want to do that?" "How can I change my temp folder off of my boot drive?"=> "why would you even want to do that?" "In C# can you make an extension for static methods?"=>"why would you even want to do that?" "My computer won't boot and only goes to a black screen, how can I fix this?"=>"why would you even want to do that?" each time I read "why would you even want to do that?" in response to a perfectly stated and reasonable question, I hope with all my heart that the aliens that will inevitably come to conquer and obliterates this horrible little planet get here just that much sooner.

[@mattmurphy7030]

Get a real answer? Why would you even want to do that?

[@leonthayne]

Agreed. Being creative isn't about why, it's about why not. I don't need my motives to be questioned if I'm just trying to do something different in the computer engineering world.

[@RomanAvdeevX]

I think it's because it often times may be easier to find the solution for the root cause of the problem, not what people think is the solution. Like, with changing the drive letter: is it because some program doesn't recognize this exact letter or is it something else, that may have an easier, more straight forward solution?

[@xpusostomos]

Sometimes asking why would you do that reveals that actually they are on the wrong track

[@YaroslavFedevych]

Must… resist… the overwhelming urge to label everything I don’t understand as a X/Y problem…

[@Pruemedia]

The best tool for the job is the one you can most efficiently and successfully get the job done with. Learning a new IDE or language every year doesn’t make things more efficient.

[@JerbilKonai]

Not to mention having to then keep an ever growing heap of legacy programs done in dozens of different languages alive at some point.

[@chlojolo]

Being a programmer for forty years means having endured not just forty years of editor wars, but literally 40 fucken years of emacs versus vi. Use what vibes with you, sure, but just don’t forget that no editor can make someone a genius.

[@elorrambasdo5233]

The editor wars are done and over Everyone knows that emacs is a perfectly serviceable operating system. It's just a shame it doesn't come with the world's best text editor.

[@meltygear5955]

People mistakingly associate "tools they use" with "their value as a software engineer" and it shows.

[@randall.chamberlain]

JB is one of those dudes who is so smart he trips himself at times.

[@SolarPlayer]

Man people say negative people have no charisma, but I could listen to smart engineers rant about how everything sucks all day. Insightful and funny!

[@felixmoore6781]

And what do woman people say about positive people?

[@ebn__]

Small nit :^) Whilst lua may very well be easier for people to pick up than elisp, I will say that the lua api still to this day feels bolted on (which it is) compared to what you have with elisp in Emacs. Also Elisp (and common lisp) are not functional languages, no matter what wikipedia says. Common Lisp supports pretty much any paradigm, it has goto btw.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

fine fine fine

[@xpusostomos]

Yeah most elisp is like a collection of functions with some global variables. Not really that hard to pick up, although a basic lisp primer is needed if you only ever saw C

[@YaroslavFedevych]

@@xpusostomos elisp feels oddly limited when you come from Common Lisp. I haven’t dabbled much in both, but when you start reading the Elisp manual, you’ll find them enumerating limitations that other lisps don’t have, so it’s “lisp, but this, but that” (types of integers supported jump out). The reason is “well because it’s embedded lisp for an editor, for fucks sake”. In 2025, the response would be “so what”, but in 1989, not so much. With Lua, you just have the same exact Lua that you have elsewhere. Lua in NeoVim is not a “Lua, but”. I can see how it may be appealing.

[@xpusostomos]

@YaroslavFedevych right.... Because of the millions of people who used Lua elsewhere.... There's work on in an Emacs with Guile lisp, but it's taking forever

[@hiyabobb]

The most vocal people are always going to be on about the flavor of the month tool or tech. You should very rarely bet your future career and/or personality on the newest tools, but it's worth reevaluating where your loyalties lie every few years which is why I don't like the fundamentalism of Blow's takes here. The "genealogy" of your tooling or technology choices doesn't matter, only how effective they are. Nobody says "well ackshually Windows 11 was originally MS-DOS Executive so why don't you just use that?", but he's basically saying that for Neovim.

[@alexisdumas84]

8:20 Classical Lisp isn't actually functional, except in the sense that it *has* higher order functions. It's actually multiparadigm, leaning toward OO and imperative programming. While that's not true of modern Lisps, since Emacs Lisp is a clone of MACLISP, it's actually true of Elisp. Thus for instance, dotimes, dolist, and while are more ideomatic Elisp for iteration than recursion. Elisp is actually very approachable IMO, if you can get past the parens.

[@xpusostomos]

Even in hard core functional languages, there's usually some macro or something that avoids you needing to recurse most of the time. The thing that makes it functional is avoiding side effects, and decent lisp programmers would shy away from writing a function that defines and changes any local variables

[@robertcarroll8102]

I think Jblow's framing isn't "Using the newer flavor of a thing is worse than using the older flavor", but "Spending your time and attention on every new thing you hear about is worse than spending it very selectively on new things only when you're really sure they'll result in significant progress for you".

[@piotrtyrakowski7551]

Just Because Its OLD Doesn't Mean Its Good, Mr Prime

[@kashnomo]

7:50 I don’t read his take as specifically about emacs vs vim or elisp vs lua. To my mind, his point is the newness of tool or technology X does not justify the cost of switching when the actual functionality is not really meaningfully different. Perhaps there is a compelling reason to use whatever editor over emacs, but that it’s newer alone is not sufficient. I realize I am commenting well before the video is finished, so I risk being made a fool. 😂

[@bloody_albatross]

I don't think you can compare TCP and UDP like that. When UDP is used today it's basically just because you can't directly use IP from user-space (in most operating systems as normal user). You would like to do that in order to write your own better replacement for TCP. But because that is not possible people just put all of that on top of UDP instead. You're not using UDP instead of TCP, your using QUIC instead of TCP. Another problem with writing your own protocol on top of IP today is firewalls only allowing TCP and UDP (and ICMP).

[@ficolas2]

Am I the only one annoyed at how JB seems to only be able to have very strong absolute opinions? He never seems to take compromises or understand people who prefer different things he does

[@ficolas2]

He does cook hard often tho

[@YaroslavFedevych]

I don’t know, he doesn’t seem to be bashing people for their choices, he just made his and would like to stay with them.

[@VimOneLove]

These are just the things that are noteworthy enough to clip and post to youtube.

[@carstenrasmussen1159]

I have used emacs for more than 30years and I changed to nvim two years ago because my son recommended it to me and I like it very much. I am still learning it but it's much simpler than emacs and I like it very much

[@istovall2624]

and just because it's "the standard" doesnt mean it's the only or best way.

[@NostraDavid2]

See also: ANSI SQL standard. It's way too bloated to be of good use.

[@denisblack9897]

Standard is often bad😅

[@steelarbiter7349]

I think the reason J Blow said what he did about NeoVim is because he generally takes the stance that the culture of modern tech is gradually degrading due to people perpetuating self-destructive approaches to coding, especially in regards to software. That belief is generally based on both observable and perceivable truths and his perspective has been reinforced as a result. I believe he just doesn't have much if any experience with NeoVim specifically so while his views in regards to tech often seem to reflect reality, in this particular case he is making a large assumption that because specifically NeoVim is "new" it must fall into the same mental category that he places most modern tech and software into. He's also much older than most modern programmers, so there is also definitely an element of being set in his ways.

[@Jonathang5730]

"Why don't you use X?" "Because X is too old. Why don't you use Y?" "Because Y is too new."

[@skilz8098]

Yeah, and here I am thinking to myself, "fuck all that bullshit". I'll use whatever is at my disposable for me to get the job done. A few years back, I came across, downloaded and used an application program that was no longer being maintained called Logisim to implement Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard CPU since I wasn't able to purchase his kits. I wasn't able to do it physically hands on, but none the less I found an application that worked for my needs for that specific targeted project or goal that I wanted to accomplish. Are there times where I have preferences? Sure. Do I try to force one over the other, mostly no. Why? It's quite simple, every application, program tool, etc. has its own unique set of pros and cons and one has to weigh out the benefits themselves for the compromise that best suites them. I might recommend an app. I might give warning towards others of the downsides or the pitfalls of an app, yet I'll never try to force another into use one or the other. I'd be more like, "I've tried X, and here's it's good points and its drawbacks, and I'd do the same with Y. Then I'd finish with try them for yourself and see which one works better for you.

[@DagarCoH]

Of all the takes about IT infrastructure, the one about TCP and UDP definitely is one... TCP definitely has its place and always will.

[@CatFace8885]

As long as absolutely trash internet connections still exist around the world, (like mine) TCP is gonna be relevant.

[@MaxLothaire]

19:15 Isn't QUIC based directly on IP and can fallback to UDP/TCP implementations for networks that does not support it ?

[@theultimateevil3430]

QUIC, as it is right now, is a software layer over UDP, if a device supports UDP, its hardware can run QUIC too, it's just a question of software support.

[@manawardhana]

6:54 Irony is the language called Fennel is just wrapping Lua with Lisp syntax. This actually made Lua more "approachable" via Lisp. And Lisp is 1950's language and still alive means something worth checking? And the points you made on FP are not very accurate. Lisp is not functional in the sense that Haskell is functional. If we Google "Lisp is not functional", we can find explanations. Being functional is not Lisp's unique strength. So Lisp settles in a very human friendly doze of FP and many other characteristics. Most of the time, the subtext behind many Lisp critics is inertia and not giving an adequate amount of time and effort to try it well. If someone doesn't like parentheses, that actually makes sense as it is a matter of personal preference. Disclaimer: My familiarity is with Clojure a Lisp dialect.

[@inzanozulu]

Please stop spreading the myth that lisp (especially elisp) is functional. Elisp in particular is one of the most imperative procedural languages out there, and even when it comes to Scheme, it's plenty nornal to write in an imperative style. CL and elisp are both a pain to write functional style because of the 2 namespaces for variables and functions

[@replikvltyoutube3727]

It's not about functional-ity. Prime and ppl just scared of parentheses

[@Archikuus]

wisp is my fawowite langwuage

[@dmitriyrasskazov8858]

@@replikvltyoutube3727 Parentheses are slippery slope. Today you wonder why not just add a pair of {} and tomorrow you wake up and they are everywhere.

[@clementdato6328]

Lisp is pretty much the first functional pl there is. 😂 wdym?

[@NostraDavid2]

> Elisp is imperative OK, and? It's still a functional language. It's imperative like Haskell, C, Rust and Python. It's not a declarative language like SQL. We got that. Unless you meant to say that Elisp is supposedly procedural, to which I'll premtively say "no, it's not".

[@SleepingDrone]

"Almost none of the world is functional." - ThePrimagen, 2025

[@bobanmilisavljevic420]

I'm a vim user who downloaded visual studio last night. Part of me is excited because it's new but part of me feels funny. I'm trying to have one computer dedicated to learning programming on Windows. I tried this before with emacs and it was fun but kind of a waste of time. If so many people didn't use Microsoft in the real world I wouldn't even bother but hopefully it's not that bad. Seems like C# people really love their language so that is keeping me positive at the moment

[@hawk_7000]

14:40 Pico was part of the pine suite, essentially the bespoke editor portion of an old email client. So that kind of writing is what it was built for, and I agree that it doesn't really make sense in many other contexts.

[@andrewcrook6444]

Speed in emacs it depends there is an alternative to using eLISP called guile a scheme dialect of LISP by GNU that compiles to machine code. I think emacs is still in a transition.

[@xpusostomos]

They are taking their sweet time if that's ever going to happen

[@heroclix0rz]

Imagine asking "why do you use the keybindings you're familiar with instead of the bindings I'm familiar with?" ✋😐🤚

[@Martin.Krischik]

11:30 Vim-Script is older the LUA. Vim-Script is almost as old as Unix itself. It's an extension of sed and that put's it all the way back to 1973. Please explain which language would you have chosen for your editor in 1973? As for VIM: I consider GViim the superior version as I moved on and don't use the terminal to run an editor. There is a lot GVim can do that normal Vim or NeoVim can't do.

[@davea136]

I wouldn't say UDP or TCP are "better", just that one may be more appropriate to use in a situation.

[@AndreasB-p8w]

What are you talking about! LISP being unpopular!? LISP is extremely popular, the "web-world" runs on LISP! But similar to Chancellor Palpatine you only seem to know the unpopular Darth Sidious, you should get to know Chancellor Palpatine, or as I call this "pal" (with a name from the urologist department) by his pen name *Javascript*

[@neko6]

Tools are better or worse for certain tasks. Just because iPhones are newer than hammers doesn't mean you should use iPhones to hang picture frames, nor does it mean you should use hammers to communicate with friends Novelty has near-zero correlation with usefulness

[@robchr]

I'm sorry to break it to you but LISP is also procedural and object oriented. You can do for loops or whatever. It's more about the simple syntax.

[@glennismade]

I think there is a miss-characterisation of what blow is on about. I don’t think his point is vim is terrible or that neovim specifically is awful because it’s new. Just that we have a tendency in the industry to hop onto the new thing and push for the adoption of tech purely because it’s new without really knowing if it’s actually an improvement/quantitive shift in the market or if it’s just new. Most of the time it’s just new. Like react over vue/angler, zig vs rust etc. are they better?? Or are they just new. This is riddled throughout the industry. We are constantly adding new technology, but it’s not better it’s just new. K8’s is a prime example. Or elastic search. They just add complexity to systems. Or this adoration of microservices, are they always better? Or just different compared to a monolith. It’s not just tech either, we do it with process too. Agile -> XP -> scrum -> Kanban -> scaled scrum etc etc. they aren’t better just different.

[@insomniaSalt]

missed opportunity "THE NAME IS we're getting in to deep I need to get back to refactoring-AGEN"

[@cornheadahh]

Why is JBlow so respected and popular in the community when he's only ever made 1 notable game that in my personal opinion was kind of average? I'm not trying to be disrespectful asking that.

[@redrj]

That video just reeks of "old man yells at clouds"

[@SJohnTrombley]

I would argue that functional style programming is actually more intuitive than imperative style programming, it's just that almost all of us started with C or Java or Python or JavaScript or whatever, and it's hard to switch once you're already acclimated to a particular style. Loops are incredibly general and, as a result, can often be pretty confusing for new programmers. A map or a fold, by contrast, is less general and consequently easier to grasp for a new programmer. Once you're more experienced, it doesn't really matter, you should be able to translate from one paradigm to the other and back, but I think, in a vacuum, learning a functional language first might actually accelerate the early stages of learning to code.

[@N0FPV]

Emacs is all about hotkeys, vi/vim/nvim is about composition of commands. Two different paradigms at the end of the day.

[@Minolrx]

I started to use emacs back in 2009 but by 2013 I was logging into many unix systems and all had vim installed I switched.

[@randyriegel8553]

As far as editors it depends on what I'm working on. My day job is mainly MS based with some Linux. If I'm writing a .NET app I use visual studio. If writing javascript, python, or whatnot I use VSCode. When writing bash scripts on Linux or editing configuration files I use VIM because they have no GUI. My first job out of college I was writing C code on an HP-UX (Unix) server.... I used VI no syntax highlighting or anything. I would just run make and wait 10 minutes so I could see if it worked or didn't compile at all 😁

[@mattymerr701]

I've been meaning to write a blog for a while now about how "The worst part about NeoVim is Vim" simply about how the remaining Vim APIs and especially anything vimscript related is just disgusting. You require treesitter to make indentation work okay, and if you want to change any formatting settings, you need to learn vimscript and rewrite the formatting rules entirely. LSPs can fix that but sometimes they have bad configurability

[@m4rt_]

I have used Emacs and Vim/Neovim (and a lot of other editors.) I am too used to the vim bindings that I use daily, so any attempt of switching back to something else has been in vain... and with Emacs, I find it far too slow, especially when using evil mode (also, the keybindings are really weird.) In the end I just stick with Neovim, as I am already used to it, and I have it all set up for me the way I like it.

[@Evoleo]

Gotta love the 20 minute reaction to a 4 minute video (not complaining at all tho, really insightful stuff)

[@TuxWing]

Oh wow, he mentioned pico, I haven't heard about that editor in a while. I remember using elm as my mail agent and pico as the email writer...oh so many years ago!

[@thesenamesaretaken]

It's 2025 and we still talk about performance of text editors, what the fuck

[@thecatisintheroom4946]

udp > tcp ? where is that the case ? we cant do udp for rtsp streaming cause frames corrupt all the time...

[@RandomNameName]

I love how even the smartest people can say the dumbest things

[@Sub0x-x40]

There is a dude from australia on youtube who kind of looks like russel brandt or ssome kind of god of rock and roll and he just sits on hes couch (probably high on ketamine) playing hes keyboard with one hand like its a fucking guitar and he is coding a game engine in c++ literally at the speed of thought using visual studio, cant remember hes name but its really a masterpiece of a coding exhibition

[@vsolyomi]

I want to live long enough to see Prime become a lisp adept and preacher

[@digitalspecter]

Some people might wonder how Emacs is more customizable than Vim. One small example is that Emacs is not a modal or non-modal editor, it's whatever it's programmed to be. That's why it can pretend to be Vim (using the Evil package)... but there are other packages too, like Meow that takes inspiration from Kakoune but it's mostly build-your-own modal editor package. I wish that at some point neovim (or the next iteration) reaches this level of customizability..

[@richcole157]

You start terminals inside emacs, it isn’t that different from vim except your shell is easily searchable and history of commands span several invocations of a program, say you ran lldb, exited it, start it again, no probs you can search back incrementally through previously entered commands.

[@xpusostomos]

There's a bunch of terminals you can run in Emacs, I'm running vterm. if you run exwm, you can run gui consoles in Emacs (not that you probably should)

[@richcole157]

@ meta x shell gets it done for me. Although alas in my environment tramp is busted.

[@MiaChillfox]

every time I look at lisp I think it looks extremely painful to type with all of those brackets and so I end up deciding it's best to leave it in the past.

[@Muskar2]

JB is probably using Windows for two main reasons: 1. it's the best OS for visual debugging (vital for understanding your program quickly), 2. it's still the main gaming platform. But it looks like those two factors might be going away pretty soon. And MS doesn't seem to care.

[@Stublet]

I think the "why don't you use x" question can be okay, depending on delivery. If it's a genuine question asked to correct one's own ignorance it can come across okay. Don't interrupt the speaker to ask though, they may answer your "why don't you..." question before they get to the QA portion of their talk. It's even likely that they will if what you're asking seems like an obvious thing that would be done. There's a very chance would have tried that thing before ruling it out and moving on to a more novel approach, which is why they're talking about it.

[@gustavpaul1]

The TCP vs UDP bit was weird. I think you meant TCP vs QUIC maybe?

[@michaeldausmann6736]

It's a good discussion about questions. Open questions are good. The critical part of an open question is that the answer is not boolean. Open questions start with When, Where, What, Who, How.......and sometimes Why. Why questions *are* open, but they can often feel, to the recipient, a little inquisitorial... so use sparingly. so. Why *did* you use X is not bad. An even better way to ask is to use those other beginnings. "What was it about X that made it the right tool for this job", "When did you start using X? What do you like about it".... Thinking consciously about how you talk to people may not come naturally to you but you can get better with practice. Just my thoughts.

[@petrusboniatus]

Normal Elisp code is literally one of the most procedural things you can't code. It's common to do things like move the current cursor just to do something with a string of text in the buffer and then restore to the previous position. Sadly a big part of it's lack of popularity might be people getting scared of uncolored parentheses.

[@webkinskid]

for loops really are more human--which is what makes recursion feel so transcendental, but I haven't written anything recursive since I started using rust, the whole strict typing doesn't really permit infinitely nested data the same way python did, but there is spatial hashing and/or quadtrees in my future, maybe those will be done recursively

[@xpusostomos]

Recursion is actually rarer than you think in functional because someone will write a macro that hides that. The reason you avoid a for loop is because it's inherently stateful.. it must modify variables. Instead you use something like mapcar to collect a set of results

[@webkinskid]

@@xpusostomos now that's something to research! I haven't heard about the rust equivalent yet, but I remember the concept from python, I'll have to look into the advantages and disadvantages and see if it's something I can make use of, I'm always on the lookout for ways to make my programs more efficient, thanks for mentioning it :)

[@vsolyomi]

jblow, the old man yelling at clouds

[@MichaelPohoreski]

Not learning Vim sooner was one of my regrets. I made a _Vim Cheat For Programmers_ to help other programmers get over the vertical cliff of Vim. Once you do, Vim becomes an extension of your mind. Well worth it.

[@xpusostomos]

Just wait till you discover Emacs

[@MichaelPohoreski]

@ Not my cup of tea.

[@davidomar742]

yea but in the end an editor is such a small detail in a programmer's career. Vim is not going to write software for you. its such a useless topic to debate imo

[@MichaelPohoreski]

@@davidomar742 Disagree. You spend 90% of the time reading code and 10% writing code. A GOOD editor will make navigation fun/painless, while a BAD editor makes this is a PITA/painfull. Modern IDEs have become slow and bloated so for just _writing_ code a good text editor can still be an advantage. At the end of the day use whatever floats your boat.

[@amicusaxiom]

FOR loops are smarter. I use an IDE that hangs in infinite loops. It’s >0 the amount of unsaved code I’ve lost every year. This is stupid - the way I program - but it’s also invaluable training. 😅

[@ZÏ̇̃]

01:00 isn't this pretty much the same thing? The answer to both questions would be almost the exact same. I think if you get annoyed at people asking why don't you use something then you might be the problem.

[@User948Z7Z-w7n]

15:45 Class component is visibly worse than functional component but it's mostly because how JS classes work. this keyword is not ergonomic

[@redfernguitar]

I started out with vi on an irix sgi machine in 1996.

[@spuzzdawg]

I dunno about this take. If i saw someone attempting to hammer a nail using a leaf, I think "why not use a hammer?" might be a valid question.

[@m4rt_]

btw, Emacs started in the terminal. (just run: emacs -nw) Fun fact, a pane in Emacs is called a window... this is because when Emacs started, there was no concept of a window, at least the way we know them now. So what we now know as a window is called a display.

[@OriginalKKB]

It's so annoying when people answer the question "I want to do X with Y, how can I do it?" with "Instead of Y you should use Z, it's way easier". Great, but I didn't ask "How can I do X?", did I. So maybe I have a reason to specify that I want to do X with Y, and it might be as simple as that I am learning how to use Y and can't figure out how to do X with it. On the same level and somewhat related: "I want to do X but can't figure it out" and people start to interrogate you "Why do you need to this?", "What are you trying to achieve?" etc. Why do you care? Favorite answer though "If you don't know how to do X then you shouldn't do it at all". Fantastic. So every expert in the Field was somehow born with the knowledge?

[@refusalspam]

Sometimes the solution with Y is so heinous and the solution with Z is so easy it would be bad not to mention it. Like “I flooded my basement, how do i get rid of this water with a straw?”. A good requirement doesn’t mandate what solution to use so that the engineer has many options to choose from.

[@Whatthetrash]

I still use Winamp 2.95, so I get where he's coming from.

[@AnonymousAccount514]

Jonathan Blow is trying to make a living publicly speaking about things that dont really matter.

[@denisblack9897]

Craftsmanship doesnt matter? You mad

[@moonythm]

The vid prime is reacting to is posted on a fan clip channel. I don't think blow is making a living off this....

[@AnonymousAccount514]

@@denisblack9897 i think the word Craftsmanship is overused in software development. The work that requires Craftsmanship is what gets abstracted away into the frameworks we use. Craftsmanship cant really be applied to hard/new problems. We dont build houses/boats. What we build is way more dynamic and requires flexibility.

[@Muskar2]

@@AnonymousAccount514 Huh? There's lots of craftmanship in doing specialized solutions to problems and ensuring a certain quality level with minimal/no bugs, high performance and novel features. And actually making conscious cost-benefit analysis on how to solve each problem from a knowledgeable position. Lastly, JB barely uses any external code, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

[@davidomar742]

@@denisblack9897 my dude, you type on a keyboard. stop pretending this job has "craftmanship" lmao you devs are geeks

[@tomasruzicka9835]

Who else got the ad when Prime changed the video quality? 😀

[@petersuvara]

Not sure. You could ask, why not use Git? When you are using SVN…

[@guycohen4403]

What about Debugger in vim?

[@toasterenthusiast6188]

Blow is the kind of guy who will literally just call anything shit and refuse to elaborate any further

[@denzilv]

UDP told me what TCP was but I didn't get it...

[@kodekata]

UDP makes you handle incomplete, out of order, delivery yourself. But how it is handled is protocol specific.

[@skilletpan5674]

Just remeber: "Everything compiles down to lisp".

[@Ratstail91]

I like the wording "Have you ever tried X?"

[@AlexMax2742]

If you haven't reflexively opened vim from inside Visual Studio Code's terminal window by accident at least once, can you even call yourself a real programmer? 😆

[@notusingmyrealnamegoogle6232]

I do this on purpose and use the code interface for Jupyter notebooks

[@senoraraton]

Just because its old, and you have used it for 3 decades, doesn't mean that the new thing is worse. It might be worse for you.

[@paper_cut9457]

my question is usually: "how do you do that ?" (because I want to try it out)