but not changing = !improving

(that's why you had to add the "substantially" qualifier)

> but not changing = !improving

Correct, but vim is changing. Latest release happened 9 hours ago, and in the past week there have been 17 commits pushed to master by 7 authors[1].

Also, there are a dozens of high-quality plugins that are in constant development.

> (that's why you had to add the "substantially" qualifier)

I was quoting the parent comment in which you originally replied (quoting again):

    I see very little reason the shell and vim will substantially change in the next 40 years…

[1] https://github.com/vim/vim/pulse

> there have been 17 commits pushed to master by 7 authors[1].

And there are 17 thousand commits overall, yet a lot of fundamental issues remain unresolved, so I guess I'd argue that in many cases a program can NOT be substantially improved without substantial changes (again, not universally!, some crash/perf wins are "free" in that they can change nothing in the program's user-facing behavior)

So I see a lot of reasons for the shell/vim to substantially change, and thus stability in this regard is a negative, not a positive, hence my comment that it's better to use tools that improve better (though you're right that improvement is not a given for a change)