Help help! I've encountered something in the perl doctrine which I could not get my mind around! It's the kind of doctrinal conflict that causes religions to schism!. Background information. My roomate and I are playing out a bit of a holy war on the gateway server in our apartment. He cripples pico using a variety of methods and tries to force me to use vi. I in turn have been figuring out ways to continue to access the pico binary no matter what he does with it. (Note this is not the roomate I've mentioned in some of my previous posts. This roomate is geek, and I actually do share a room with him as opposed to just the house)

But we were walking somewhere yesterday, and we got to the discussion of why we are waging the fun little war of "hide the binary". He said that vi was extremely convenient, and though it had a steep learning curve, it allowed one to do exactly what is needed, no more no less, I countered that I was too LAZY to go through the steep learning curve. He countered that he was too IMPATIENT to do anything less than press three keys when he wanted to move to the next paragraph. I again called LAZINESS when I stated that 99 times out of 100, pico could do exactly what I wanted it to and that moving by pages, and then holding the arrow keys to move wasn't that bad. I further acknowledged that pico was a shotgun approach to solving the problems but that was okay because it still got the job done adequately. In addition to laziness above, I called IMPATIENCE on the grounds that I usually didn't have time to do an elegant job of things, and usually once the job got done, I could clean it up later if it really mattered. He then called HUBRIS by saying he wanted the job done better than anyone else. He tried to counter my IMPATIENCE by offering me hypothetical infinite time, but I said that wouldn't matter since my patience is not linked to how much time I have, and that had I infinite time, I'd merely jump and do other things. He would need to offer me infinite patience, which would be quite a heretical thing to do. :-)

So which are the correct application of the virtues, and which are the heretical standards? How do we resolve this!?!

~W
(BTW, I will eventually learn vi. I admit it is a superior editor. However I cannot learn it now, because that would be conceding defeat in the skirmish. :-)

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