On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 09:14:33PM +0200, Bertram Scharpf wrote: > > first thank you all very much for the backings. I'm on the > way losing trust in my own mind. > > Could this be normal? I've been in two jobs during the past > year and not one of these well-paid colleagues calling > themselves degreed software engineers does even know about > Vim (neither Emacs). None of them is having Linux at home. > Extrapolating from this I don't expect my next job being > much better.
[begin rant] It's been my experience that many people working with computers want access to the very latest hardware but when it comes to the software they use they tend to stick with what they know and are extremely unadventurous. I know many, many people who use Windows notepad as their editor because it's the default text editor on the PC and it's never occurred to them to find something better, even though they might spend several hours laboriously changing things that could be done in ten seconds with a regular expression search and replace. It's the same with web browsers: count the number of people you know who use Internet Explorer, not because they're tried several browsers and find IE suits them best, but because they've never given any thought to trying an alternative. I work on software that uses an Oracle database. We're currently migrating our software to Oracle 10, but from time to time I'll meet Oracle programmers who have yet to learn about the new features that were introduced with Oracle 8.1 way back in 1999. They still code as if they might someday have to port their code back to Oracle 7. Far too many computer people learn one way of doing something and then stick with it forever no matter how inefficient it is, just so long as it lets them get the job done in the end. They're not interested in working efficiently if that would require them to learn something new. I once knew someone who protested because I installed Vim on a system under the name "vi". He didn't want any of the new features of Vim. He didn't even want them to be there but not in use. He wanted to have a product that behaved _exactly_ like vi. He wasn't a vi expert: he didn't know about keys like "f" and "t", or options like "autoindent". All he knew was the basic commands, and that was all he ever wanted to know. It amazes me that people like this find work, and it amazes me even more that they're able to keep it. It's as if they're children who have decided: "Walking? No thanks. Crawling was good enough for me when I was six months old so it's good enough for me now." [end rant] -- Matthew Winn ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
