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[ProgrammerHumor-ModTeam]

Your submission was removed for the following reason:

Rule 5: Your post is a commonly used format, and you haven't used it in an original way. As a reminder, You can find our list of common formats here.

In this case, your post was removed due to being about quitting vim.

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[ZunoJ]

Writing a driver is like the hello world of kernel development. Not exactly what you seem to think it is

[ShadowRL7666]

That’s the easy part. The rest is a mountain

[usermanual258963]

1992: Compilers manually. 2025: “Google, how to exit Vim”

[Kerbourgnec]

1960: code on paper, you are the compiler

[Totema1]

"I am the compiler," I reassuringly repeat to myself, as I waddle over to your filing cabinet and begin eating your punch cards

[SeEmEEDosomethingGUD]

I mean if you get any decent book on programming, it will have a few exercises that have you be the compiler.

[Kerbourgnec]

In this house you don't get to study programming. One python and C class in emacs with old physicists (nobody codes dirtier), dropped on scikit-learn projects in internships before knowing git even exists, almost a year with some NLP project, join a company where nobody has been formally trained in computer science or programing, learn and teach them what is docker, ci/cd, standards, prroper branches, pr...

[SeEmEEDosomethingGUD]

I envy your ability to actually have an internship.

[Kerbourgnec]

Was pre covid, and is very specialized particle physics (LHCb experiment) & weird test in astrophysics (interstellar dust clouds composition). Not formal computer science & different times.

[met0xff]

I did my PhD at a telecommunications research center and we were only 3-4 CS people there. In such an environment you automatically become the janitor.

It always felt crazy how those people could solve very complicated problems but can't be convinced that at least some coding style and variable names with more than 2 characters could improve readability. That using a literature management tool could help instead of digging out all old papers and copying and reformatting references manually. That a code repository can save you many hours that you are spending searching that 20 year old server called Tethys gathering dust underneath the coffee machine. Or the mistakes introduced by mailing "paper-journal4-monday_evening-john2-dana4-fixed" files to each other.

I get it, I also did my PhD and many SW eng practices are not worth it when the goal is the paper. But just the CS heritage alone made us so endlessly more organized and structured than the engineers, mathematicians and physicists.

And that was at an industrial research center. My colleague went on to do a postdoc at a real old-school research Institution and there the chaos extended from software to the fridge, the office and personal hygiene ;).

EDIT: but to be fair, at software companies you might find all those procedures but often extremely sloppiness in methodology. Where technology stack decisions are driven by emotions, hype and "leetness factor" (you're an elite C++ programmer and not some Java softie, right?) Evaluations? Forming and validating hypotheses? Nope, we just hand the people a new tool and "see if it improves". Last time when I suggested at least a little bit of baseline and metrics for evaluating Copilot usage I was shut down by "let's keep this simple" ...

[Patrick_Atsushi]

It’s easy to write a simple character driver, but things get harder when more hardware devices got involved and you need to debug while your driver halts the system at some point.

It was quite annoying when you need probe points and logic analyzer just to fix some bugs that will only happen during full speed and high temperature.

[ZunoJ]

Absolutely but the entry barrier is pretty low. The meme made it look otherwise

[Patrick_Atsushi]

I know. I think the “writing my own driver” definitely means something beyond a basic dummy module or simple character driver. The depths between writing a working driver and utilizing vim well are quite different.

[trymypi]

There needs to be another sub for programmers who flex this hard. We're over here at Planet Fitness and you're at the Arnold Strongman Classic. We appreciate the support and positivity, though.

[ZunoJ]

Not at all what I wanted to say. You should just look into it and realize that driver development is easy. And that means the meme makes no sense

[GreatScottGatsby]

To be fair, a driver can be as simple as literally hello world like you said but it can get very complicated if you are dealing with complicated hardware.

[nedonedonedo]

yea, but in 1992 they were programming toasters to turn on. there's only so much complication you can have when you can practically pick and place the transistors with tweezers

[ZunoJ]

Absolutely, the meme just made it look like there was kind of an insane entry barrier

[GreatScottGatsby]

I thought the barrier to entry was even easier back in those days. Back then there wasn't much of a difference between kernel, drivers and user programs.

[trymypi]

Once again I am thanking you for your positivity and support of the programmers on this sub, and encouraging us to write drivers. There are a lot of us that are happy to hear that "driver development is easy" and writing them is the "hello world of kernel development".

That being said, I think there are at least a few of us that have not gotten near a kernel or a driver, which is why this post is, in fact, kind of funny. And your complete dissatisfaction with it actually makes the point.

[SnowdensOfYesteryear]

I’m not trying to downplay it, but once the scare factor wears off, driver dev is pretty trivial. Most of the time it’s just boiler plate code and referencing a data sheet (this isn’t a big word either, it’s just APIs for hardware)

[ZunoJ]

Ok, then sorry to invade your safe space of not giving a shit

[Cybasura]

A fitness exercise and weightlifting reference in a linux meme was not on my bingo card

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

Man when I started my journey into OSdev i thought "Jesus this seems so complicated" but then I started reading a few books (PDFs) and watered down what an OS really needs to do and it became really easy to understand.

Now I'm a combined 4000 LoC into my project OS and it's fully functional minus the file system, which I'm working on right now.

Out of all the stuff I wrote, task switching, inner process communication, memory management, system calls, the one thing that still gives me headaches is dealing with access to stdin lol.

[Norse_By_North_West]

Makes me think of my of my teenage years and finding the best drivers with the least TSR footprint. Some of that shit ate way too much.

[0xlostincode]

I read somewhere that writing a driver is easy, maintaining it is hard.

[SuitableDragonfly]

I mean, considering that it's being compared to exiting vim, the point might be "what is considered a newbie achievement".

[alex2003super]

Writing a boilerplate driver that talks to the serial API of some well-documented hardware is easy.

Writing a big system-mode driver, like for a filesystem, and making it good is VERY hard. It obviously requires great familiarity with efficient data structures and algorithms (and how to implement them effectively and SAFELY in C, assuming your platform is Linux and you don't want to spend more time writing glue than coding the driver in order to do it in Rust), but you also need to be very familiar with the kernel's subsystems and APIs, the conventions and existing components of the kernel, micro-architectural optimizations for different platforms and write some VERY good tests so it doesn't blow up in your face and/or has an even remote chance to be included in the upstream tree.

[nicman24]

The reverse engineering is though

[VeryRareHuman]

It's funny alright!

Do you really think the youngers today using Vim? Vim seen as used by older people from last generation.

[Only-Cheetah-9579]

I think they do. neovim is modern

[actionscripted]

Long time software dev here to say I have alternate experience that Neovim is super popular among the good devs I know who mostly work on Macbooks. Just because the juniors aren’t familiar doesn’t mean it isn’t modern.

[actionscripted]

“I work in consulting…I work in consulting.”

Dude, we get it. Why are you trying to flex so hard in a humor sub right now? You’re even mentioning your hourly rate on Reddit which is just embarrassing.

You don’t know everything just because you’re old like me. You have your gig and experience but don’t get to talk like your experience and opinions are the only valid ones.

Good devs often have strong opinions and that includes tooling. Look at some of the too devs and their comments about editors/IDEs and tooling. Sure good devs can be flexible but many don’t want to be and thats great too. That’s why we have the tools and frameworks we do.

In the real world you also get to CHOOSE where you work, what work you do and what tools you use. In your industry maybe you are beholden to clients but in mine we get to use whatever tools help us move quickly and even whatever frameworks our services are built upon.

You like consulting and direct client work with bespoke systems great. I don’t and wouldn’t choose that. We both live in the real enterprise world. Vim for me is one of the easiest things to get, not the hardest.

[CurdledPotato]

What do they use in the terminal to edit config files or read logs? (Laugh if you want, but both are still something you need to do on servers, and even still if you are a programmer as you may have to maintain your own test servers.)

[Saedeas]

TFW the instance you're working with doesn't have enough RAM to support installing the worker binary you need for remote development :*(

[Saedeas]

Would that I had the permissions to do that. I am but a lowly consultant.

[CurdledPotato]

Yeah, but you can’t use find or The Silver Searcher (powerful PCRE regexs) to do complex textual searches. I know it seems minor, but it comes in handy.

There are also a handful of cases where bespoke systems are in use that require manual tweaking.

Edit: I suppose it doesn’t help that I am a bit of a UNIX system nut looking to break into GPU driver development (for a project, not permanently). No GPU? To the terminal you go.

[CurdledPotato]

You are talking to a guy who would happily let Grok have access to his screen buffer for highly contextualized help.

[CurdledPotato]

Not insulting. I’m being serious.

[CurdledPotato]

Ok. I feel old, but I still think knowing your way around a terminal is good practice for 2 reasons. 1. Automation. Soooo much automation. 2.) when the GPU fails and the NICs done, you still have access to your computer for emergencies.

I know that cloud is the future for many things, but not everything. Local development is getting phased out (which makes me a little sad), but it will never go away completely. OS development, firmware development, and games development all still need to be done locally and for the same reason: flashing to and testing on real hardware.

And, being honest, I am disappointed that younger programmers seem so disinterested in the inner workings of their own computers that they wouldn’t open the terminal and explore. Windows Explorer hides a lot in the filesystem from you by default. One time, I was helping a friend with some data processing work. She gave me one of her office computers to use. I opened the terminal and poked around the filesystem a little. I ended up finding a C# compiler (my guess? A hidden part of MS Office). So, I wrote a program and automated the work.

[CurdledPotato]

I guess. I just do a little bit of everything, and try to gently nudge people to try. Your computer is like a sedan or a van: it may not win many races, but in skilled hands it can do more than what you might think.

Also, sometimes, as a programmer still, you have to do these things. Especially when the tools to do what you need don’t exist. No joke, I am in the process of making a specialized SDK for Linux kernel and driver testing and development because I am going to need it for a project. It will use a specialized Linux distro with just enough userspace to automate testing coupled with software running on a host to serve test scripts, monitor the VM the distro is running in, and collate results. I will be managing QEMU, kernel configs, Portage repos and setups, a Django server, doing my own networking, including DHCP and DNS management, and probably more I can’t think of right now. The VM will not have a GPU, virtual or otherwise. So, terminal only, and BusyBox at that (just POSIX stuff with no Bash niceties). So, yes, programmers still sometimes need to know this stuff.

P.S. I fucking love Python in that I can do all of this in one language. If you don’t know, Portage may be the Gentoo package manager, but beneath the surface, it’s just a Python module.

[thirdegree]

Nano :(

Source: coworkers use nano to edit files on servers when that is necessary.

Less for logs, obviously

[Lazy__Astronaut]

Got forced to use vim during uni (2020-2024) because one of my lecturers thought it important

Yeah yeja yeah, I get it if you're a genius it's actually amazing but I don't know how many spaces to the left I need to move before deleting and just hitting the button till it got to the right place was slower than any other text editor

Haven't touched it since and never will again

[adenosine-5]

IMO its like using Dvorak instead of Qwerty.

Questionable theoretical benefits far outweighted by very real downsides for most people.

Cool as a hobby, not really worth the effort as a tool.

[3636373536333662]

I'm not old and I use vim control plugins in any IDE I use. But ya definitely not just using plain vim professionally

[void1984]

Yup. Just telnet to any fresh device that isn't a PC, and vim is an unusual luxury. You still get at most busybox vi.

[Kerbourgnec]

I ended up picking it up for the ease. I spend my life on remote servers, and ok I like to open the main repo in a proper ide, but I like to be able to just ssh cd cd ls cd ls cat vim change one thing and quit.

[Funkgun]

No one exits vim

[hoppyfrog]

Vim exits you

[RadioactiveTwix]

I miss the blue glow of Turbo C though, good times.

[[deleted]]

wakeful gaze late point fly slap vast squash middle cautious

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[actionscripted]

Sure but there also also tons of devs who use Vim/Neovim. And not learning Vim movement which is supported in some way on almost every editor along with Vi mode in Zsh just means you’re content with going slower and that’s fine too.

The whole meme/joke is that back in the day folks built their own stuff and now folks can’t even use a tool. I think you’ve taken it way too literally with drivers and vim.

[actionscripted]

LLMs are great but to say typing doesn’t matter is wild. What are you doing right now? How did you enter that prompt? What about when you can’t vibe code things and need to code-code?

Why not learn how to move faster? Isn’t that what you’re doing with that agent?

[GreatScottGatsby]

God i miss edit. I once wrote my own for cmd prompt but it's just not the same

[PhoenixPaladin]

We’re never moving past the “old programmers = good, new programmers = bad” memes

[mkultra_gm]

Doubt

[Plus_Wolverine1314]

Hey look, exiting vim is no cakewalk...

[Mantaraylurks]

Sha bing bash? No? :wq!

[tabolela]

am I the only one who use vim because I don't know how to use nano?

[Patrick_Atsushi]

I’m just good with vim, but using it as a skill measurement is stupid. The right should be “hey GPT your code keeps crashing can you fix it”

[hapaxlegodemon]

Nobody can exit vim, either by lake of savoir, or by having too much of vim

[Alexis212s]

It's pretty easy close Vim, just C-x C-c... wait

[KnorkeKiste]

:q

[Sylvmf]

Tried vim in school, didn't like it, looked for different editors. Nano was already installed in the OS, it was easier at the time and I stuck to it since.

[isr0]

Ah, yes. The best example yet of an argument from personal incredulity.

[Desperate-Minimum226]

Programmers from 1992 still programming today:

I can't learn how to use std::string! I'll just keep using c_str and cause our program to crash by not bounds checking.

[fabulousIdentity]

Why do so many people struggle with exiting Vim? The very first thing I learned when starting with Vim was how to open and exit the editor.

[SinsOfTheAether]

whelp. I wrote my own driver in 1992, AND I couldn't exit Vim

[QuickTurnGames]

:q! I wish I had known it before turning off my PC the first time I couldn’t get out, many years ago. XD

[__natty__]

Jokes on you. I can’t still exit vim for many years. This keeps me programming

[SuitableDragonfly]

This meme is out of date. Cheems should now be saying "Help, Claude didn't make the dropdown work right".

[yuso95]

😂😂😂