Re: [OT] "steep learning curve" ... but what is it actually?

On 2017-07-30 09:10, tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> Suppose this "steep learning curve" would be a graph
> in the mathematical sense -- I would think, that
> the X-axis represents t (time) and the Y-axis represents
> the amount of knowledge k in turn.

I think the confusion comes because it seems to be a factor of two
things over time: there's how much you need to know before you can
accomplish something productively, and how completely you know the
editor. With something like nano or notepad, you start typing and
the text appears. There are on-screen menus to guide you in
quitting/saving and basic search/replace. Additionally, their
feature-set is sufficiently small that you quickly learn all their
limited functionality[1]

Meanwhile, the next set of editors (Sublime, Visual Studio, Atom,
etc) tend to make things accessible via menus and GUIs. They present
a lot more power and complexity, but still manage to keep things
approachable for basic activities.

Finally, editors like vi/vim, emacs, and ed have next to no help (vim
improved on this with the opening screen's tips, but they're not
visible if you are dumped in a file). Vi/vim/emacs have huge numbers
of features (I've been using vim since around the turn of the
century and am still learning new tricks ~18yrs later) that can be
combined for combinatorial functionality, including scriptability
meaning they can grow functionality that the original authors never
created.

So the proverbial graphs tend to refer to "how quickly can you get
started" as well as "how limited are you".

-tim

[1] notepad does have one or to obscure features like the timestamped
log, and nano does have additional functionality to learn like syntax
highlighting. But these "advanced" features are a pretty small
extension of the whole.




--
--
You received this message from the "vim_use" 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

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_use" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to vim_use+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.