"However scary it may seem, switch to emacs, evil mode is good enough."
"There's this thing called lisp, you should check it out."
Amusingly my younger self did actually get this advice (thanks Randall [0]), but I did not know what to do with it at the time, other than to file it away for exploration in the future. Only over a decade later when I finally had enough context could I actually take action on that advice.
This is one of the reasons why I find general advice to be useless in many cases. "You should do X" or "You should not do X" are practically useless, and often the person already knows that they should or should not do something, but they have no idea how to get from where they are to that imagined future. If all you can give is advice, the best you can do is try to give advice about the very next step so that someone can actually act on it. "Check out lisp" should be, "go install this package, and read this book," or "here's a professor you should take a course from." When I have gotten advice in the form of "take a course from this person," it has always proved to be invaluable because the first step was stupidly simple, and the rest of the journey had a guide who had walk that way before.
"There's this thing called lisp, you should check it out."
Amusingly my younger self did actually get this advice (thanks Randall [0]), but I did not know what to do with it at the time, other than to file it away for exploration in the future. Only over a decade later when I finally had enough context could I actually take action on that advice.
This is one of the reasons why I find general advice to be useless in many cases. "You should do X" or "You should not do X" are practically useless, and often the person already knows that they should or should not do something, but they have no idea how to get from where they are to that imagined future. If all you can give is advice, the best you can do is try to give advice about the very next step so that someone can actually act on it. "Check out lisp" should be, "go install this package, and read this book," or "here's a professor you should take a course from." When I have gotten advice in the form of "take a course from this person," it has always proved to be invaluable because the first step was stupidly simple, and the rest of the journey had a guide who had walk that way before.
0. https://xkcd.com/224/