On 12 September 2013 09:04, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > Joshua Landau <jos...@landau.ws> writes: > >> On 12 September 2013 00:44, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: >> > mnish1...@gmail.com writes: >> > >> > My main advice: Avoid non-free (that is, proprietary) software for your >> > development tools. Learning a set of development tools is a significant >> > investment, and you should not tie that investment to a single vendor; >> > if they lose interest for whatever reason, your investment is stranded. >> >> If the time learning a set of tools is enough to make the choice >> between tools, I suggest avoiding, say, Vim. > > Rather, the effort (not merely time) spent learning a set of tools is > enough to advise choosing tools that will be around and supported by the > community for a long time, and have a wide applicability.
The sum time it takes to make Vim a good editor and subsequently learn it is comparable to doing the same for a good number of other editors. Vim's quite hard to learn, see? If you accept that point, you should accept that if Vim is worth the investment then, ignoring issues of other editors being of different quality¹, the potential of support for your editor being dropped involves no greater opportunity cost than learning Vim. As Vim is obviously an editor many consider worth learning, we can conclude than if you prefer certain non-free alternatives you are not putting undue effort on yourself. Of course, there are a lot of other good reasons for OSS to be favoured and there are a lot of reasons to like other things, too. ¹ Whatever that means --- I conclude that I am right and everyone else is wrong, because if it were not the case I would be wrong and I've already asserted that I am not. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
