On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Jim Oberholtzer
<midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
a large amount of the development on AIX is in COBOL. Up
until IBM provided them with Rational, they did not even have
a true development environment on the UNIX side. (VI and
VIM are not development environments but rather little
brothers to SEU)
I'll grant you that vi is nowhere near Eclipse when it comes to
providing a "development environment". But when it comes to
***editing code***, vi is actually much more capable than SEU, and Vim
is even beyond that.
There is a difficult learning curve with vi, including configuration.
If you want to knock it for anything, knock it for that. I fully
admit it's a pretty serious knock. Also, SEU has extensive built-in
support for certain programming languages that vi doesn't, but that is
because the two editors were developed on vastly different platforms.
If you want to program in any of the numerous languages that are
available for (and typically included with) Unix and Unix-like
platforms, vi is far superior to SEU. Even if there were a Linux
version of SEU for programming in bash, C, Perl, Python, Lisp, PHP,
and on and on ad nauseum, vi would win hands down.
(The only argument you would ever get from Unix/Linux users in an SEU
vs. vi debate is "why isn't Emacs in the conversation, because it
wipes the floor with both of them". Emacs is actually capable enough
that it potentially *does* rival Eclipse as a development environment.
But in some ways it's even harder to learn than vi, so in practice
people only master at most one of vi or Emacs.)
John
midrange.com
