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

I think the learning curve is said to be steep by comparison with an
uphill path. So x would be how far you get and y would be the amount
of expended effort.

But does Vim really have a steep learning curve? IMHO what it has is a
virtually unlimited set of capabilities — considering that it has a
Turing-complete configuration language which seems more or less
Algol-like to me (though without begin..end statements, instead with
specialised endif, endwhile, endfunction, etc.) it feels to me that
the power of Vim, especially of a feature-rich "huge" build, is
limited only by the user's ingenuity and by his/her command of the
scripting language.

Who says Vim has a "steep" learning curve after all? I may be wrong,
but I have a hunch that it's mostly people who tried Vim for an hour
or maybe a day and noticed that they were still far from knowing all
and every bit of the ins and outs of Vim. So what? My take on the
subject is that, on the contrary, Vim is easy to learn because:
• there is the vimtutor, a very well thought-out step-by-step
hands-on tutorial;
• the online help is at your fingertips and it covers every single
bit of what there is to know about Vim.
• there is even help about how to use the help: see :help helphelp
Other programs have a page or two of online help — when they have any
— and even with their limited featureset, their help falls far short
of it. I admit that there are a very few, extremely few even,
exceptions such as Mercurial. But even the Mercurial help, which is
quite complete compared to many other programs' help, doesn't compare
with the Vim help for ease of use. In Vim, once you're in the help,
you go from one topic to another by double-clicking or hitting Ctrl-]
on any word on which you want help, allowing you to learn Vim by
reading its help by the Monte-Carlo method, as you would an
encyclopædia, by going from one topic to another in no predefined
sequence.
But — yes, there is a but — with Vim, unlike with, say, Notepad, there
is a lot to learn. You can master Notepad in a few minutes, a few
hours if you're a slow learner. With Vim's, Socrates's maxim comes
into its full force: «The more I learn, and the better I see how
little I know.» To my way of looking at it, this is not a defect but a
quality: it means that Vim packs so much power that it is worth
learning it bit by bit, a little every day for years after years.


Best regards,
Tony.

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