for me, it is more like "40+ years of vi". vim is simply the best version of all of the vi-based editors that i have used, across many platforms. vim is brilliant (and i am very sad to hear of the author's death), but i think we really owe it all to bill joy.
Vim's addition of .vimrc and .vim allowing you to store editor programs to further accelerate your editing makes stand vim far beyond vi.
Credit Bill Joy for the modal editing paradigm, but vim is so much more than that. Most editors have a vi mode, but they don't compare to vim because they are awkward to script and don't have powerful regular expressions so readily available (both introduced in vim).
We could thank Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for enabling vi, but I thank Bram for keeping vi viable, portable, and well-supported across languages.
Same for me: vi (later vim, later neovim) since the late 1970s. I used ed in the early days, too, and that may be why I love the fact that vi* lets me type ":" to do powerful things.
i had to teach a C programming course that used ed as the editor because i could not at the time get vi/ex to work because of terminfo/termcaps and other problems (which i later fixed). also bourne shell. students, who were on a basically business oriented IT course in about 1985 (?) never complained.
try inflicting something like that on people now, though it might be good for them.
