Tastaturkaste

Obwohl ihr Niedergang länger dauert als erwartet, sehen sich Technik-Schamanen zunehmend mit derselben Ablehnung konfrontiert wie intellektuelle und politische Eliten. Michael Sapka bemüht sich vor diesem Hintergrund um ihre Ehrenrettung:

A few months ago I’ve read that promoting usage of basic tools, like Vim, is gatekeeping. The reasoning behind this made sense - those tools are complex, require time and dedication, and therefore may lock people out. But I can’t stop thinking about this idea because I deeply disagree with it.

Vim is complex, sure. Terminal is complex, of course. I won’t even go into Emacs, as it’s complexity within complexity and should be considered a field of its own. But is gatekeeping? Are people like me just up our smug butts, thinking how almighty we are and how we hate the pleb? Some of us, sure, as using aforementioned Vim is a badge of honour. Yet, I don’t think it’s gatekeeping.

Firstly, why do we promote those difficult tools? Because computers are complex machines. It was true at any point of computing history. Initially, all tools were complex, abstractions were unachievable due to technical limitations. So yes, starting was much more difficult than it is now.

But you learn. Some may say: you pay the high cost of entry, but is it cost? You’ve learned things. With each problem you’ve fixed, you gained knowledge. And this knowledge was transplantable! Learned how the system hierarchy works? Great, now you can use it everywhere! Next time you encounter this problem, it will be much easier.

This allowed for bedroom coders, kids who were able to master the computer. Not everyone was as smart as Carmack, but we were still able to operate the beige boxes. The complexity was there, but it was for us to toy around with.

This has not changed one bit. Computers became much more complex, but if you can use basic tooling it means that the complexity is close, you can reach it. Does it require time? Sure. Is it doable? Sure!

Now, back to 2020s. Vim is a thing of the past , you can write sentences of simple english and it may even work. You don’t need to use a terminal - everything has a web UI. Perhaps you don’t even need to learn anything, simply subscribe and have it ready for you within minutes. Why try to run a bare-metal server, when you can get a ready machine using docker within minutes? I think this is the idea behind “vim is gatekeeping”.

But the complexity is there, like it always was. The only difference is that it’s hidden, unreachable. You may be able to understand how ec2 works, but most likely you won’t have time to it. There are too many problems with the abstraction.

Natürlich sind die Akzeptanz von und das Interesse an Komplexität nicht identisch mit einer elitären Torwächtereinstellung, aber gewisse Einstellungen wirken auf andere Menschen dennoch befremdlich –

– auch wenn sich problems with the abstraction besonders gut mit dysfunktionalen GUIs, verständnislosen LLMs oder – besonders perfide – einem LLM-gestützten Terminal illustrieren lassen. Unterschiede in der Komplexitätstoleranz dürfen natürlich nicht von den wirklich wichtigen Fragen ablenken oder die Tastaturkaste von der Solidarisierung mit anderen Arbeiterinnen abhalten.