Despite having 7 years of back end experience, I've never learned vim. Is there any other editor that hits these requirement (being able to login to any server to edit text) or does every server engineer need to learn vim?

(I mostly use a mix of sublime, intellij, and vscode to edit text)

Real developers only use cat >> <file> to edit, and start from scratch if they make a mistake.

Finnish has no grammatical gender. Is it easier to learn than Spanish?

Yeah for you yes, for others it's synonym with colonialism, and armed invasion.

"Easy-to-learn" is very subjective. There's a lot of different languages spoken in the EU and the accessibility of a language environment matters.

Because so far noöne has figured out the set of extensibility points needed for a language-agnostic one that doesn’t result in horrible bloat and sprawling API surfaces. The original language-agnostic IDE—Emacs—is probably the simplest, and it’s still quite complex. Acme[2] is interesting, but Spartan when it comes to actual IDE-ish features, and its UI always rubbed me the wrong way.

I feel this is somewhat related to the fact that noöne has figured out how to do extensible widget toolkits or scene graphs either. (Yes, Electron does in fact solve an actual problem, if in a profoundly unsatisfying way.) Actually, just a text input box that could handle the complexities of the world’s writing systems (RTL, complex font shaping, arbitrary input methods, autocorrect, all that with at least one cursor or selection) and was capable of supporting the facts vs rumors approach from FRP[1] would be a significant advancement re toolkits. As for scene graphs, I don’t actually know of any viable general approaches to assembling an interface out of independent parts (that doesn’t work by presupposing a large substrate of features in the host “shell” and providing a separate extension point for each of shortcut, menu item, toolbar button, sidebar, dialog, ...).

Actually, now that I’ve written all of that out, it seems that another way to put my second point is that the language-agnostic IDE problem is a proper superset of the composable GUIs problem, and nobody knows how to solve that one. Composable CLIs are easy—they’re called “[textual] programming”; but then composable GUIs (or TUIs, the graphics/text distinction is immaterial here) would seem to correspond to visual programming, and last I checked the latter still sucked.

[1]: https://apfelmus.nfshost.com/blog/2012/03/29-frp-three-princ... [2]: http://acme.cat-v.org/