Of all the arguments for the author to pick, the "archaic" editor issue is probably the most insignificant/ most misunderstood. There is no arguing (at least in my little world) that using tools like vi/ emacs make you a FAR better programmer than hand holding IDE's like VS. When you need to make vi/ emacs do something for you, a knowledge not only of the programming process, but also the inner workings of the editor must be understood. There is really no better way to expand knowledge than being forced to do things for yourself. Perhaps one could make an argument for productivity (in regards to things like VS), but I believe that a skilled vi/ emacs user will be more productive in many languages, whereas most Microsoft coders live in a world of .Net, or Java coders live in a world of Java.
Geek loves to praise his tools and pulled assumptions over thin air for everything else.
vim/emacs are nice (I'm a vim user) but gosh... have you ever tried the latest JetBrains offering? PyCharm? RubyMine? the JS editor.
The only reason I'm using VIM is because I'm just that _weird_. My dream setup would be a 11"/13" laptop with nothing other than a console and a web browser. If IDEs can fit that screen (which they can't right now...) I would dump vim in an instant and never look back.
That IS my setup at work. I've recently discovered mutt and irssi which I use for email and chat, respectively. All development happens in tmux sessions with vim. My dock contains finder, iterm2, chrome and the trashcan. If I could remove finder and the trashcan I would...
On a slightly related topic, I've started investigating writing a console based email client recently in Python using Urwid for curses stuff that's a little less archaic than mutt.
Disclaimer: Church of Emacs