Still using software from 1976

A few weeks ago, I needed to generate an HTML dropdown menu using text from a spreadsheet. It was a pretty sizable spreadsheet, so it seemed like quite a bit of tedious work. And it would have been exactly that if I'd manually copied each line. But thanks to a little software program written in 1976, I was able to create the necessary code in just a couple of minutes.

One of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems wrote vi while developing the BSD operating system. It's since been included in just about every Unix-based system in the world, from the servers in our datacenter to the newest MacBook Pro.

On the surface, this software seems to do so many things wrong for the modern world. The hardware for which it was designed to be useful doesn't exist anymore. The interface is counterintuitive. There's very little inline help. It doesn't work like most other text editors, clearly violating Jakob's Law (which is technically about Web-based software, but the principle applies elsewhere).

But vi is extremely fast and enormously powerful. There's absolutely nothing better for manipulating text. I've used it to turn server logs into SQL statements to restore critical data. I've tried doing similar text manipulation in Dreamweaver, only to have the system bog down after processing a few lines.

Modern copies of vi have been updated slightly, but it's still basically the same software that Bill Joy created over 30 years ago. The Web development industry follows a lot of fads and fashions, of which some are truly useful, but many are simply stylish. Finding something that's as useful in 2008 as it was 1976 is remarkable.

It just goes to show that newer is not always better. Truly great products are timeless.