I will just copy paste my comment from another thread but still very relevant>
Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares
Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.”
They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”
Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.
Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.”
In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.
That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.
So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.
I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.
Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares
Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.”
They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”
Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.
Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.”
In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.
That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.
So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.
I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.
I have to agree. It is too similar to vim, yet it is not vim.... I dont get what is the value proposition here. I mean I feel helix is just stripped off SpaceVim ????
But more importantly,it reflects the reality that although they bear some resemblance, the design logic of vi and Helix are actually fundamentally different.
In helix that's %d (select-buffer, then delete). The selection-then-action design for helix is showing it's difference to vi, which is action-on-movement.
not really, vim's visual mode always extends selection, while in Helix the base mode selects with your base commands so you can act on the selection, but it doesn't extend to the next one. For example, moving by 2 words only selects the 2nd one, not both like in Visual mode.
(although in this specific case of selecting everything this difference isn't visible)
The details are different, but they're both select-then-act. Admittedly, I've never used Helix, but I don't see how what you've described is a game changer. Surely, at least sometimes, what you want to do is exactly what visual-mode provides: explicitly select a region, using the combined movement of any available operator, and then act on that region.
Surely you understand the difference between sometimes and all the other times? This is a game changer for all those other times. Otherwise helix has a similar extending selection mode like visual
> This is a game changer for all those other times.
Is it though? I honestly don't understand what the big deal is. The original contention was that the benefit was in offering selection-then-action, unlike Vi. And then when it's pointed out that Vim actually offers selection-then-action as well, there is a new assertion that it's the particular WAY that Helix offers selection-then-action that is key.
To my mind, selection-then-action is provided by Vim if you want it. Maybe it's a few extra keystrokes sometimes, because it's not the default mode, as it is in Helix, but the main concept (ability to think in object-then-verb) is available in both, if that's the way you prefer to think.
> I honestly don't understand what the big deal is.
Honestly, you't not even trying to
> To my mind, selection-then-action is provided by Vim if you want it.
Ok, let your mind be content with ignoring the difference that I've just explained. By the way, you can also trivialize vim as "it's just a fewer keystrokes sometimes to do the same as in notepad, what's the big deal?"
Why do you think that? I've been listening to what you say. But again, you haven't exactly proven that operating on the single-most-recent movement (which as I understand it, also defines the selection) is the thing that you want to operate on the most often, rather than the convenience of being able to use the flexibility of multiple movements to define a selection.
Anyway, many people do claim that an editor isn't the most important thing, and that thinking takes a lot more time than the operation itself, and that therefore Notepad would often be sufficient. What those people don't really appreciate is the ability to operate on multiple lines at once, not a single selection, but across vast swathes of the text being edited. When your thinking is done, and needs to be applied to every single line of the file, you'd much rather have Vim than Notepad. But in such a case Helix wouldn't offer much, if any, advantage over Vim.
You seem emotionally attached to this in a way that my skepticism provokes, so we can drop the debate. People should use whatever they prefer; no harm done.
I have loved it since '99, when my friends used to tell me that to be a linux admin you have to stay up late because midnight commander works only after midnight ! Slackware 7 <3
So we pay roughly 3 times more for the same functionality... Is the convince worth that much?? By this logic in 2090 people would have to pay most of their salaries for that "one device".... Dystopian....
> So we pay roughly 3 times more for the same functionality
How do you figure that it's 3 times more? The article says those things add up to $5100 updated for inflation (written in 2014, so more today). A smart phone then was a lot less than $5100.
You’d have spent $3054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5100 in 2012 dollars.
For a fancy but not top-end device, we pay one third, or one fifth inflation adjusted, not three times as much.
For a budget device, we pay, what, 2%? Not 2% less, just 2%.
It’s worth clarifying a few points about Islamic teachings and history regarding intoxicants.
First, the Quran does not categorically declare all intoxicants haram (forbidden) in the legalistic sense often assumed. The verse commonly cited (2:219) does not prohibit wine or similar substances outright — it acknowledges both the harm and potential benefit:
> "They ask you about wine and gambling. Say, 'In them is great sin and [yet] some benefit for people. But their sin is greater than their benefit...'"
This is moral guidance urging caution and reflection — not a blanket prohibition. The prohibition as we know it today comes from later jurisprudence built atop evolving interpretations, often informed by societal conditions, not an explicit Quranic ruling alone.
Second, many prominent Islamic thinkers in classical times engaged deeply with altered states and substances — sometimes even celebratory of them. Avicenna (Ibn Sina), arguably the greatest polymath of the Islamic Golden Age, wrote on the medical and philosophical effects of opium and other psychoactives. Other thinkers — like al-Ghazali, Suhrawardi, and Sufi poets such as Rumi and Hafiz — explored the boundaries between mystical experience, reason, and sensory perception. In some cases, this included symbolic or actual engagement with intoxicants to describe the ecstasy of divine union.
The idea that “no Islamic leader in their right mind” would ever touch such substances overlooks both historical nuance and the breadth of Islamic thought — from orthodox jurists to radical mystics. The same diversity of perspective exists today.
If you are interested in learning more about the topic there is a great book about it :
"Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing
Book by Michael Muhammad Knight"
Finally, equating religious belief with hallucination because both may involve altered cognitive states is philosophically flimsy. That a mushroom trip can lead someone to perceive “God” doesn’t invalidate faith any more than a dream invalidates memory. Experiences can reinforce prior belief without reducing them to mere neurochemistry. Correlation is not causation — and even if it were, that would not necessarily diminish the meaning of the experience.
Yes, agreed on all fronts. I am familiar with Knight as well. The literal word is intoxicants, not wine. And different substances were interpreted as intoxicants later. But after being declared intoxicants, Islamic leaders would not go near it. Avicenna was a Muslim researcher and philosopher, and not religiously minded. Sufis experimented with various elements of mysticism and some experimented with substances even to this day. But there explorations were attempts to find God and perhaps understand intoxicants’ effects on the brain. I put them under the researchers’ category.
Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares
Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”
Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.
Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.
That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.
So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.
I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.