A young man begged an audience with Master Wq to read him
his latest work, an ode to the glories of Vim. With tearful
eyes he read out his heartfelt words, pouring his soul into
his veneration for his text editor.
The master sat and listened to the poet for a while. After
the tenth verse, he held up his hand. "Please, no more. Your
poem is awful."
The young man was very angry.
"Master Wq, surely you of all people can best appreciate the
poem, you who know the great beauty of the editor. How can
you be so terse, so dismissive? I even wrote this poem in
Vim!"
"You wrote it in Vim," said the Master. "But your meter is
uneven, your rhyming pattern inconsistent, your metaphors
mixed. You have written a very bad poem using a very good
tool. You are not a poet, and Vim will not make you one;
many of my students are not programmers, and Vim will not
help them either."
"Vim is eternally beautiful," protested the poet. "It is a
worthy subject for an ode."
"Vim is not permanent. nvi is not permanent. vi itself is
not permanent, only vi-nature. Emacs has vi-nature, nano has
vi-nature, even Notepad has vi-nature. You narrow your
sights, you grow attached, and hence you do not grasp the
true value of your poem’s subject. You must leave. Come back
when you have mastered Emacs."
