Re: vim suitable for professional software development?

On 23.08.15 16:33, taschentuch@posteo.de wrote:
> i'm wondering whether VIM is really suitable for professional
> software development. I have no considerable experience with vim,
> linux, software development or anything else mentioned in this post,
> i.e. i'm a beginner
...

Over three decades in embedded systems development, the latter two in
software development, the only modern editors I used were vi, then vim.
The software was developed for very large transnationals (one with over
400,000 employees at the time), and was deployed in national
telecommunications networks. Incidentally for almost all the projects,
across a variety of targets, the toolchain used was GNU. (I.e gcc and
binutils)

The flexibility of both provided a very comfortable sense of control of
the development environment. Though superseded now, cvs was the
versioning tool of choice, and gnu make completed the quartet.

>
> 1) Let's assume your vim configuration is broken at work and you
> can't fix the issue within 20 minutes. I assume sth like 20 minutes
> is the upper limit for vim configuration things, before your
> colleagues or boss gets angry. Most, if not all of your needed
> plugins aren't working correctly.

I would not use plugins as a beginner, and retain a copy of a simple
trouble-free .vimrc for instant fall-back, before embarking on any
improvements. Then you can futz with prettiness in your lunch hour,
without risking wrath from upon high.

> * How would you react in such a situation? Would you temporarily
> switch to e.g. Eclipse?
> * How would you react when you have very important stuff to do?
> * How often does such a situation happen?

Depends how clumsy one is, and how careless in providing instant
recovery.

> => I'm not very experienced with vim, so i have honestly very big
> fears about such situations, standing helplessly in front of a
> unusable editor and a lot of work to do.

The unknown is a dark place, and therefore appears perilous.
Thus, remain in the small circle of light cast by the entry door, and
venture forth at the pace at which you can master your tools.

Remember:
Understanding "undo" is more important than any editing tricks.
Using a version control system, for calibrated fallbacks, is highly
advisable.
Tested, reliable backups are essential, because data which exists in
only one place will soon not exist at all.

Understand also, that if you use, say, the flapdoodle editor today,
and it disappears in a puff of puce smoke, then you can resume work with
any other. Plain text is served by any number of editors. The best is
the one with which you are most productive.

In my software teams, developers were free to use any editor they liked,
and I did not ask what they used. To avoid formatting clash, I simply
mandated that no tabs be used, i.e. tab should insert spaces to suit, as
Vim does with "expandtab" set.

Heck, some even used DOS-boxes and M$ editors, giving rise to the CRLF
line ending issue. I simply fixed that before committing files to the
source code repository.

...

> => I have also very little experience with Vim or shell scripting,
> therefore i fear that someday i can't write a convenience
> plugin/script and have to work in a (compared to e.g. eclipse)
> inefficient way - or change the editor, because the support fore that
> language/framework is not enough.

It's not necessary to burn your bridges before you've crossed them.
Don't use any scripts in production till you're confident they work
well. Code bashing can proceed without. If the need for a script is
great enough, either you'll learn how, or someone who can will be found
by someone with authority to hire.

> 3) GUI development.
...

Programming with a text editor is text processing.
There are code generating tools, such as for ITUT SDL (Specification and
Description Language.) They can be fun, but expensive.
They are quite different games to play, in my experience.

The human brain is not equipped to learn all this stuff in a day.
Not all that can be learnt is useful to every individual.
It is more productive to identify genuine productivity bottlenecks,
opportunities for helpful automation, e.g. cindent, and spend time
learning only that which is useful now. (I.e look at Vim's help and
other documentation in spare time, and choose what is worth learning.)

Erik

--
Emacs is a nice OS - but it lacks a good text editor.
That's why I am using Vim. - Anonymous

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