Post #1513691

@samgoree another thing I've been mulling over is comfort with editors, which is sort of a follow-on to touch-typing. I've shocked students by adding a method to every Java class in a file with a one-liner in vim. And of course, to be fair, adding a method to every class in a file by abusing sed-style search-and-replace both requires a deep comfort with syntax and existing program structure, and is objectively a bizarre way to express a conceptually structural change. So it's not exactly an obvious thing to do, even if it's common among long-term vim and emacs users. But when I watch students use their IDEs, even as seniors, I see them do things like use textual find to locate definitions, tabbing through dozens of call sites before hitting the declaration, instead of "just" using the IDE's built-in go-to-definition. To students who don't understand their IDE as anything more than a text editor with a compile&run button (I'm sure some working professionals are in this camp, too), doing complex structural changes quickly by any means must seem magical.