this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
12 points (92.9% liked)
Programming
27640 readers
196 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In a lot of ways, I think software that harkens back to an older era understood the assignment exceptional well: when you're working on a glass TTY attached to a 9600 baud modem via a microwave network to the university computer in the next state over, the latency from the connection itself was pretty bad. So to then have inefficient software that "lags" would be intolerable.
Fast forward to the present day, with broadband and 1 ms latency, it's less of a concern, sure. But good software remains good software, even if the environment has improved. And for some, my work often travels with me aboard the train, where the congested 4G backhaul really makes me appreciate the miserly bandwidth of vim and SSH.
I also find myself reconfiguring systems that only have no editor installed except VI (and sed, lol) due to disk constraints. So while the command set is grossly reduced from vim, they have similar commands and workflows that I can maintain proficiency even in these sparse environments.
"Lowest common denominator" software definitely has its use-cases.