Andrzej Szczygielski <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes it is 21 century but does it mean reliable although old tools (so to > speak) are worthless. If age is your main issue so propably it is worth > realising how many 'aged' technologies are still in use today and they are > based on principles as old as humanity
If your main argument in favour of having vi on the LPIC-1 exam is that we've been using the wheel for 3000 years and it still seems to look like a good idea, then I would suggest that is not a particularly great argument. Where did I say vi was “worthless”? I said exactly the opposite. There can be no doubt that it *does* work as a text editor. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is a text editor that everyone should use for everything, all the time. Please consider the following: Many people who go for LPI certification have worked with a text editor (on Linux or a different platform) and have certain expectations about how such a program should work. In the 21st century, this normally involves using the arrow keys to navigate to the appropriate place in a file and start typing; in my experience people tend to find it something of a hassle to have to remember to use “i” and “Esc” just to insert a couple of characters. Holding vi (of all editors) up as the gold standard of text editing on Linux also adds to the system's reputation as old-fashioned, obtuse and inconvenient. It is possible to justify why vi works the way it does by asking people to imagine themselves in the 1970s when cell-addressable video terminals had just become popular but the idea of arrow keys had not yet caught on, but that suggests that there has been no innovation in Linux text editors in the intervening 40 years, which as we know is rubbish. There are various perfectly adequate and widely deployed text editors available for Linux which *do* work very much like text editors on other platforms that these people are likely to know already. So do we really want to *force* these people to spend considerable time learning all sorts of detail about a text editor whose philosophy of operation dates back to a time when terminals didn't have arrow keys, and which does not work at all like people would expect from past experience? Learning Linux already involves enough of a cognitive load that we don't really need to torture people with something like vi unless we absolutely have to. Frankly I don't know what people see in vi, and why it must be defended at all costs. I say eliminate vi from the exam altogether, or downgrade it as far as possible (see my previous message). If people *want* to use or teach vi, by all means let them – but don't force it on people who'd prefer to do more productive things with their time. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau ... Linup Front GmbH ... Linux-, Open-Source- & Netz-Schulungen [email protected], +49(0)6151-9067-103, Fax -299, www.linupfront.de Linup Front GmbH, Postfach 100121, 64201 Darmstadt, Germany Sitz: Weiterstadt (AG Darmstadt, HRB7705), Geschäftsführer: Oliver Michel _______________________________________________ lpi-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-discuss
