> It’s a college class in which students are supposed to learn something new

Unless the central thrust of the course is supposed to be the mechanics of a particular dated editor, the restriction described seems to be a distraction from rather than an aid to what the students are supposed to be learning.

It doesn't make any more sense than a social science course where the deliverables for most assignments are essays mandating WordPerfect for DOS. Sure, you'll learn something you might not otherwise, but it's a distraction from what you came to the course to learn.

> particular dated editor

I wonder how you feel about age discrimination. Old != bad.

I started using Vim when I was 14; I was the only one in the class who wasn't using an IDE. Vim (perhaps combined with a language server if you're okay with the complexity) runs circles around bloated IDEs like IntelliJ/VSCode. Unix combined with a tiling WM is the best IDE in existence.

The professor in question is likely doing the students a service by showing them the advantages of minimalism and function-over-form over the trend of bundling an OS with every "app". Many students today only feel comfortable using software that saturates their synapses with colors and animations; having to use Vim for a semester forces the good ones to realize that maybe, just maybe, function should come before form. Maybe 10k lines of C or POSIX shell solves a problem better than a VC-backed Electron app.

To continue your analogy, WordPerfect and DOS, unlike Vim, aren't better than today's tools. What would be an improvement is LaTeX/BibTeX for writing essays. Once I realized how much work was automatically done for me--from Chicago-style footnotes/endnotes and auto-generated ToC from headings, the time I spent formatting my papers dropped to zero. I would absolutely incentivize students to use these tools over "modern", bloated word processors.

Cool, I use nano. Should I be penalized?

Minimalism for the sake of minimalism isn't what I was arguing for. If it were, I'd say that every paper and program should be written with `ed`, the standard text editor [0].

What I was trying to say was that if minimal solutions run circles around bloated ones thousands of times their size, and when it takes a startup and two funding rounds to develop something that does exactly what tools did three decades ago less efficiently, then maybe Braithwaite was on to something:

> “It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” -- Keith Braithwaite

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Modal editor are not dated. You’re saying this as if the command line itself is dated. It’s not, casual user can go ahead and use Windows or Mac, but shell and she’ll editors will not in the foreseeable future be dated.

I suspect the rationale is that, depending on the language you're using, some IDEs "help" with coding to the point where they're correcting your mistakes and even writing parts of your code for you. This is pretty much a selling point for everything JetBrains makes, and arguably even Visual Studio Code rubs against the edge of that if you're using a language that's well-supported by IntelliSense. The central thrust of the course is presumably how to write code yourself, and the case could be made that learning with an editor designed to routinely save you from yourself isn't going to be as good as an editor which, well, isn't.

(This is setting aside the argument as to whether Vim is a "dated" editor. Vim is an old editor, to be sure, but forget WordPerfect -- it's not as old as Microsoft Word is!)

I still prefer what they made us do for the test: Write the program on paper.

Vim is far from dated, and comparing Vim to wordstar shows how little you understand it