On 12-Jul-2011 11:17, Marc Weber wrote: > Excerpts from Ingo Karkat's message of Tue Jul 12 09:36:52 +0200 2011: >> IMO most of the complexity is due to the Vim API, not VimL itself. So, unless >> you completely redesign the API (and that probably means changing much of the >> core Vim implementation as well), you won't gain that much. > From your homepage it looks like you've spend some time with various > programming languages. I read "Java, C++, Unix Shell scripts, Perl, ..". > > So probably you love error messages like something has gone wrong in > 10..27..34 as much as I do. [1]
Those remind me of long cryptic C++ template errors :-) But this is far from my biggest gripe, which is the amount of idiosyncrasies in the Vim API. But as I said, though selecting another language would offer a chance to do away with some of these and make it easier for beginners, this is far from a done deal, and would require a lot of contemplation. (In this respect, I envy Emacs, not because of Elisp, but because much of Emacs itself is implemented in it (or so I heard), so there are better integration points and smoother interaction of plugins with the editor core; in Vim, if there's not the right autocmd-event for you, bad luck.) > And the amount of plugins available for Opera, Firefox which have been > written in JS at least proof that JS is a language many devs can pick > up and to turn their browser into what they want as well. With tons of snippets in the Vim Tips Wiki, and thousands of plugins on vim.org, you have to give the Vim community some credit. > Moreover for JS etc there exist many more libraries such as parser > generators etc. You're right: For VimL there exist XML parsing libraries > as well (-> webapi-vim on github). But it took 30 years until someone > stepped up to write it. And still then it was buggy and had to be fixed. > > Resources are wasted here. Keep that in mind. Those resources could be > spend on writing a web aware vim implementation or on Uganda or on > installing energy saving items in your house. [...] Your plans and expectations of Vim are different from mine. I just want to edit various sorts of text and code in a lightweight, portable and versatile editor. If I wanted to do something that involves XML parsing in Vim, I'd rather look to, say, Eclipse, and write a plugin for a "real" IDE instead. (I do use IDEs in parallel with Vim.) But then, if you're able to channel your frustrations with VimL into a "new kind of Vim", congratulations. My point is just that fitting this into the existing implementation while keeping its supposed purity will be hard, and likewise, building a modern clone of Vim in parallel poses enormous challenges, too. -- regards, ingo -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
