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A comment on Why I Still Use Vim. Parent comment

Re:Why I Still Use Vim by vbezhenar on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @08:07AM (#15080762)
A lot of people have similar complaints about Idea. So your complaint is only different because Atom happens to eat a bit more memory. Do you know that Emacs means "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"? See, it's wasn't different 30 years ago. One can easily build a workstation with 128 GB memory if he's making money with it, it's not very expensive, so 1 GB of RAM would be less than 1%. I don't see much issues, honestly.

Of course it's nice when programs are fast and not hungry. Reality is that developers happily trade performance for power of abstractions.

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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by icebraining on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @08:22AM (#15080860)
One can easily build a workstation with 128 GB memory if he's making money with it

That's a very narrow perception of the profession. There are developers making money all over the world, and hardware prices don't scale down according to national salary levels. Even in Western Europe, that's more than a month's salary for a medium-level developer in some countries.

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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by melling on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @08:37AM (#15080975)
How much RAM does the average developer have?

I’ve got 16GB in both my 7 year old iMac and 4 year old MacBook Pro. I’ll probably get a new computer next year with 32GB of RAM. I don’t think an editor using 1G-2G matters to me.

I don’t currently use Atom but if they innovate faster and eventually build a better editor, many devs will choose it.

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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by icebraining on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @09:14AM (#15081237)
We moved from 4GB to 6/8GB in the past five years.
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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by pjmlp on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @02:51PM (#15084080)
Around here the most lucky ones have 8 GB, while some still have machines with 4GB.
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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by wolco on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @08:50AM (#15081061)
The average is 8g still running windows 7.
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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by melling on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @10:17AM (#15081693)
Wow, it’s time to reread this:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/hardware-is-cheap-programmers-...

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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by icebraining on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @10:33AM (#15081803)
The whole point is that many programmers, even in Western Europe, are not that expensive. When one makes less than $20k/year, those "mere" $4k suddenly pay for a full trimester of work, rather than less than a month.
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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by melling on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @11:09AM (#15082074)
How about providing some facts instead of making it up as you go? Who's making less than $20k/year? Who can't afford to buy 16GB of RAM? It's $130 on Amazon.

I think I had this same conversation when someone told me that the average developer can't afford the $70 for Sublime Text.

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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by icebraining on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @11:36AM (#15082321)
Who's making less than $20k/year?

I did, for the past five years, working as a Python dev in my country of origin (Portugal). And I occasionally went to interviews, and the offers were not better than what I already made, nor did most of my college friends make more than that.

You can imagine how much some developer from an actual poor country makes.

Who can't afford to buy 16GB of RAM? It's $130 on Amazon.

Prices are higher here, but in any case, that's the wrong question. Those $130 are worth much more to a person making $20k/m, or to a company paying that much, especially since many costs (not just hardware) don't drop with the salary levels (and in some cases are quite higher, e.g. gas prices), and so even the share of disposable income, not just the absolute value, is much lower. So it'd be absurd to waste that meager margin on RAM just to use a fancier editor.

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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by melling on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @12:30PM (#15082862)
If it's just a fancier editor then it's not worth investing any money into upgrading for anyone.

If you save 20 hours a year then it pays for itself. Everyone's economics are different, and the amount of time saved may be different. In the United States, you only need to save a few hours of work to make the upgrade worthwhile.

Fortunately, Atom is free so we can evaluate it to determine if it's worth the hardware upgrade.

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Re:Why I Still Use Vim by truncate on Thursday August 24, 2017 @05:06AM (#15088625)
Just to add there are students too. I was an international student until last year and made less than $20k in Boston. I had 8 GB of RAM, it wasn't plenty, but it was just enough. I definitely would not have preferred to use Atom then, as the benefits over Emacs weren't worth the trouble I would have had otherwise.
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