Silly. This is like saying "Stop innovating." Everybody thought search was a done deal when GOOG arrived. Mp3 players all seemed fine until the iPod arrived.
I remember when Mark Pilgrim was "stalking" Dave "appropriately named" Winer. I haven't read him much since then, but this seems like a lot of his stuff: best if taken with a grain of salt.
He has a point, most software sucks & most people underestimate the difficulty of implementing good software, especially unglamorous software like text editors & word processors. And most of the people who underestimate the difficulty of implementing good software are incapable of seeing how bad their own software really is. Examples that spring to mind: PHP, newLisp, MySQL.
I'm sympathetic to any argument against the flood of "text editors" that are really just skins on top of the Cocoa or .NET text editing frameworks. And I'm incredulous when I see someone write a whole application because they don't know that a feature exists or they don't realize their editor of choice is extensible. The other day I saw a blog entry about a guy who wrote a text editor because he wanted to use his whole 24" screen with as little "chrome" as possibleaEUR"I thought it was a joke.
I disagree with Pilgrim that all of this is a problem. Yeah, most people shouldn't write a text-editoraEUR"even for their own edificationaEUR"because it's enormously hard and the results are going to suck. Efforts are better put into evolving an existing not-quite-optimal program (e.g., AquaEmacs) (where this is possible). But every so often something really revolutionary or great results from somebody doing what they "shouldn't have"... and it's fun.
Well, nothing may be new in this case, perhaps. But innovation happens very erratically and in spurts. One never knows what an artifact will be used for in the future, or what it will inspire to be created next.
Regardless, my main argument was against the author's overly sensationalistic and dangerous "stop writing text editors" point.
That post is stupid, and the author comes off like a condescending know-it-all.
(1) If someone wants to write a text-editor, what's it to you? There are countless independent software projects, the vast majority of which are developing new versions/implementations of a pre-existing concept. Look at mail clients: there are hundreds, and they all still basically suck, IMHO. The fact that there is clearly an audience for this style of editor suggests that there is something valuable about these editors that is not found in older editors (I don't use them, so I don't know).
(2) Text editing is a fundamental activity; if we could improve its efficiency by even a few percent, that would be enormously useful. Developing a slightly better solitaire game, say, is far less useful than developing a text editor that makes people (even a small group of people) more productive.
(3) The griping about runtime size is inane. "You're bitching about 22MB language runtimes. Stop doing that. It's 2007.", one could say. If you need a very small editor, there are already 10+ to choose from, and a dependency on a .NET/Java runtime is otherwise not a big deal.
(4) As for the evidence-free claim that the people using these products are analogous to "script kiddies", and that the "real authors" don't use them -- well, not sure any further comment is needed.
Even if the rant seems to be about nothing (who seriously cares if someone wants to make another text editor? let them make whatever they want), you have to admit the quote used as the YC news headline is great.
Do you really think that the world needs more condescending blog posts and less text editors?