To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks. He has your giant program. He has no time to read it all, much less understand it. He wants to rapidly find the place to make his change, make it and get out and have no unexpected side effects from the change.
He views your code through a toilet paper tube. He can only see a tiny piece of your program at a time. You want to make sure he can never get at the big picture from doing that. You want to make it as hard as possible for him to find the code he is looking for. But even more important, you want to make it as awkward as possible for him to safely ignore anything.
Your problem with Vim is that you don’t grok vi. You mention cutting with yy and complain that you almost never want to cut whole lines. In fact programmers, editing source code, very often want to work on whole lines, ranges of lines and blocks of code. However, yy is only one of many way to yank text into the anonymous copy buffer (or “register” as it’s called in vi).
The “Zen” of vi is that you’re speaking a language. The initial y is a verb. The statement yy is a simple statement which is, essentially, an abbreviation for 0 y$
Now, remember, these dimensions are all in opposition to one another. You can spend a three days writing a routine which is really beautiful AND fast, so you’ve gotten two of your dimensions up, but you’ve spent THREE DAYS, so the “time spent coding” dimension is WAY down. So, when is this worth it? How do we make these decisions?
The answer turns out to be very sane, very simple, and also the one nobody, ever, listens to: “START WITH BREVITY. Increase the other dimensions AS REQUIRED BY TESTING.”
