I'll just put this here for you:
https://code.google.com/p/vim/source/browse/src/eval.c
Yes that's nearly 25,000 lines of mixed spaces and tab filled pre-C89 C with 492 occurrences of #idef, many appearing in the middle of a function definition. I recently ran vim with debug symbols compiled and it was nice enough to dump a nice 4GB regular expression log file in my project directory. The way to turn that off is to find some ifdefs and comment them out. If vim won then well, I'm not sure what winning means. I've switched to emacs with evil, which in my opinion is better than vim in a lot of ways.
> (Objective-C has had a kind of zombie revival due to iOS, but I don't expect it to last).
Yeah ok, "zombie-revival" sure, your credibility gets a score of 0 here. This isn't an argument, it's a prediction, and a stupid one. Nobody will come back to check your comment in 5 or 10 years and call you out on it. This is just the certain kind of asshat thing you can say and not worry about it coming true or not because you're some anonymous commenter making the internet richer with your irresponsible use of a keyboard.
Winning means the user experience, not the code. And sure, I was lazy, it would be more accurate to say vim and emacs won between them (and are still fighting it out).
> Yeah ok, "zombie-revival" sure, your credibility gets a score of 0 here.
Do you disagree that a) Objective-C was more or less dead prior to the release of iOS b) almost all people currently using Objective-C are doing so solely because it's the language you can write iOS apps in c) absent huge, radical changes, Objective-C will never threaten Java's popularity the way that post-Java languages (C#, GHC Haskell (very different from the language that was standardized in 1990), Go, Scala) are?
Objective-C is used to build applications for Apple software. It's not a threat to Java, but that doesn't mean Objective-C is dead. Objective-C will be around for a long time to come. It's a modern language that powers all of Apple's most recent technology. They have no reasons to change, and there are no signs that Apple is on the verge of disappearing into the aether.
Vim is shitty software. I like the UI, but the thing is single threaded and everything runs on the UI thread. There's no hope for async, or an event loop, or even a settimeout like feature. The code is full of globals and trying to add new features to the thing is going to result in inexplicable, unfathomable seg faults. Vim uses shitty regular expressions in the UI thread to do syntax highlighting which is why that's slow for big files and why the syntax highlighting breaks.
So the code matters. There will never be powerful IDE like features as long it's this single threaded thing that only ever does anything as a response to user input. Given the state of the code, changing this does not seem ever possible.
Run VIM in a sub-process, and communicate with it through a fake terminal. Basically, quarantine the madness.
For what? A specific niche of web applications?
Least substantiated claim of 2014 so far.
The "GNU/Linux" vs "Linux" discussion is a long one but I'm pretty sure there's (almost?) no GNU in Android.
Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system
because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about
the only component in common between Android and
GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.
GNU Emacs is much better. It's easier to use and easier to extend.
Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better.
IBM did win the war, and then shot themselves in the foot with pricing on their new generation (which generation was a pretty radical shift). There's not much chance of git doing that.
Java did win the war; its competitors from the time are largely dying (Objective-C has had a kind of zombie revival due to iOS, but I don't expect it to last). You could argue that Ruby has overtaken it, but again the changes over the last ten years of ruby - and the influence of rails - have been enormous.
I don't think we should stop trying to make a better VCS. But I do think we should accept that Git has won against bzr and hg in their current form; neither of those will displace git without radical changes that they are probably unsuited to make. Most likely the successor to git will be a new program entirely.