I am helping my girlfriend to learn Javascript, and it hurts inside that every once in a while she gets confused with something I have to explain her it's because the author of the language made rookie mistakes/dumb decisions 20 years ago.
Javascript has the requirement of backwards compatibility. The limitation is not technical. It's disingenuous to suggest it's so simple to replace these things or it's extremely naive.
Look at the recent HTTP redirect article for example. Something as simple as redirects have been implemented incorrectly for a long time. Browser vendors are well aware of it, but they cannot change the behavior because it will break every existing site that expects the broken behavior.
You should be more impressed with the things that last 20 years, not embarrassed. It means they were actually engineered well enough to be a good general solution.
Another possible way to interpret the 'ashamed' statement is that tinco is simply saying we should be trying harder to move forward when we are using such old technologies with such warts. Why can't we get rid of the warts? We should try harder. Perhaps this is what tinco is saying? I think at least equally plausible to the naive position you're projecting onto tinco...that it's 'simple' to replace these things.
Kudos to Neovim for making the effort! It is certainly appreciated.
Does ^[ cancel input in any programs ? AFAIK vim understands the ^[, not the "escape key". the key labeled "ESC" creating a ^[ is a convention used in terminal emulators.
Not that it's going to help you now, but if you had trained your fingers to hit ^[ rather than the escape key (or even ^C but that has other semantics in windows whereas I don't think ^[ does), I wonder if you would be having the same problem now..
Vim understands "escape" to be 0x1B, pressed by itself (not as part of a longer escape sequence).
And the ESC key has been generating ASCII 27 on keyboards for a long time. It's definitely not just terminal emulators.
some people discourage the use of the Esc key and prefer to use Ctrl-c instead. I'd recommend to disable it and force to use the Ctrl-c combo. I did it and completely forgot about the Esc key(actually I find it more comfortable)
imap jk <Esc>
I don't use Vim much now because I work a lot in Windows, and Vim got me into the habit of hitting escape when I was through entering text, but escape cancels the input in a lot of programs. However, I still use it in the shell or when I need to make certain global edits.
I wish Neovim great success, and I might use it someday if it meets my needs, but not just because it's new technology.