In 1998 I served an LDS Mission to the Philippines. Those of you who are familiar with how LDS missionaries operate know the drill: you spend ten weeks learning the language in a classroom setting and then you get sent out with a more experienced missionary to try it on your own. And anyone who has ever tried to speak a language they’ve only heard in a classroom setting knows what comes next: you spend a lot of time staring at people who speak a language you thought you were pretty good at, and you have no idea what they’re saying.
So I set myself some goals. I wanted to laugh at a Tagalog joke, because I actually understood it. I wanted to get my accent to be less terrible1, and I wanted to actually think in Tagalog. These were little stepping stones I set for myself, goals I was trying to reach to show that I was actually gaining some actual fluency in the language.
And then, one night a few months after I landed in Manila I had a thought, just three words that came to me as I was walking across the town square: “Kaya ko ito!” That was it. In English2 it’s “I can do this”. But that’s not the point. The point was that I had the thought in Tagalog instead of having it in English and translating it. I had a long way to go, but it was clear that something was happening, and I was learning something. Since then that thought has come back to me from time to time when I’m trying to do something difficult. I’ll start in one something, bang my head against the wall for a while, and all of a sudden there will be a moment of clarity, a brief glimpse of the summit after the first day’s climb, and the words “Kaya ko ito” will come back into my head. I can do this.
One of those difficult things has been learning vim. While I’ve been teaching myself to use it3 I’ve had a lot of moments where it just seemed too hard, too useless, and I had to set myself some goals. They were simpler goals, things like “don’t lose half a file and have to restore it from my git backups again today”, and then more useful goals, like “actually use the search and replace engine,” followed shortly by “actually use vim’s regex engine without the very magic flag”. Litte steps to show that I was making progress.
And one day, just a little while ago, I had a simple task ahead of me: remove the last three arguments from a function declaration. Without really thinking about it I got my cursor inside the parentheses and since my cursor was just before the closing paren I typed
d3F,
And that was it. In English4 it’s “delete back through the third comma before the cursor”. But that’s not the point. The point is that I just did it, without looking at a cheat sheet, without using help, without standing there for two minutes trying to figure out how to do what I knew I wanted to do. It was the “Kaya kong ito” moment all over again. I know I’ve still got a lot of vim to learn, but it’s clear that something is happening, and I’m learning something.
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According a couple of people who knew me early in my mission I was attempting to speak Tagalog with a British accent. Given the fact that I grew up in Boise, Idaho I can only imagine how terrible that sounded.↩
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More or less. It’s not grammatically perfect, but it’s close enough that people would have understood what I meant.↩
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and writing a book about using vim.↩
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More or less. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, and probably a better way to explain it, but it’s close enough that vim understood what I meant.↩