I find this line of argument really weird. Obviously mastering his tools is only one of many things required of a master craftsman, but the relentless pursuit of excellence in all dimensions of ones craft is the minimum possible criteria for ever attaining it, almost tautologically.
It's like when people complain that leetcode is nothing like the job: yeah, it's a pretty bad test, but you're making a bad argument about that because CS knowledge is extremely relevant to the job, unless the job is assembly-line library composition.
I've consulted for companies that had all their dev boxes on coder or something, and you get really good at vscode really fast or you don't have much luck. It's more than 5%, but even stipulating that it's 5%, whoa, 5 percent?! By installing a bunch of stuff off a list on GitHub and dropping some aliases in your bashrc or zshrc? in a few weeks you're five percent more effective? Anyone in any field from banking to bioinformatics would think you were joking or a scam artist if you offered them 5% more efficient outcomes at that price.
Regarding OG editors like ed and ex and sam and stuff? I can absolutely believe that someone with a lifetime mastery of one of those tools could smoke a VSCode user, it's not at all obvious that VSCode is an upgrade to vim/etc. along any dimension other than low barrier to entry. ditto emacs which is about 1000x more powerful than vscode and the difference in library/extension ecosystem is not measured by size: the emacs one is identical to the vscode one with bottom 90% by quality sliced off the vscode one.
And this stuff compounds, you get a bit better at the tools and you can read more code faster, read the right code faster, start moving the derivative of the derivative.
It's also extremely non-obvious that collaboration at the kinds of scales and complexities that make exceptional skills or experience in it a top 3-5 core competency for people doing most software. Study after study going back to Fred Brooks and the Mythical Man Month have demonstrated that relatively small teams of people who get along very well coordinated by a relatively small number of highly technical managers who take the offload on the high-complexity cross-org collaboration is the golden ticket. It's the same reason computers have dedicated routing tables in the NIC and that those things talk to even bigger and more specialized machines that do all routing all day: you don't want to scale O(n^M) with the communication overhead.
A hacker needs to work really well with their immediate team, and have a good dialog with a manager who is both technical (to understand the work) and who devotes a lot of energy to complex collaboration.
> I can absolutely believe that someone with a lifetime mastery of one of those tools could smoke a VSCode user
> And this stuff compounds, you get a bit better at the tools and you can read more code faster, read the right code faster, start moving the derivative of the derivative.
I think you're overestimating how much tool choice impacts developer productivity.
Yes, using good tools is important. Being comfortable with and knowing your way around your toolset will make your life easier. But it won't make you a better programmer. It won't "smoke" anyone else. It's not a competition.
The time we spend reading and writing code is relatively minor compared to the time we spend thinking, designing, communicating, and collaborating with others. Reading and writing code is not the productivity bottleneck. It's understanding what you're reading, making a mental model of the system, and thinking about how to translate your thoughts into working code. The mechanical aspects of it are relatively insignificant. Especially nowadays when we have LLMs to automate those mechanical parts, for better or worse.
If the time a programmer spends collaborating is more than the time they spend reading and writing code, they are optimizing for something other than software outcomes. And I appreciate that this is one of the lowest points for employment and advancement on the basis of demonstrated merit in the history of the business, maybe that's a smart play for people with certain priorities.
Not my cup of tea. I'm trying to become the absolute best I can be every single day at the absolute limit of my abilities and hopefully just a little bit past them as measured yesterday. I think competence as criteria is going to make a big comeback fairly soon.
the activities with the highest ROI for me has been into better navigation and searching, then executing some commands on the result. The gap from thinking about doing something to having the thing done has been reduced greatly.
It's like when people complain that leetcode is nothing like the job: yeah, it's a pretty bad test, but you're making a bad argument about that because CS knowledge is extremely relevant to the job, unless the job is assembly-line library composition.
I've consulted for companies that had all their dev boxes on coder or something, and you get really good at vscode really fast or you don't have much luck. It's more than 5%, but even stipulating that it's 5%, whoa, 5 percent?! By installing a bunch of stuff off a list on GitHub and dropping some aliases in your bashrc or zshrc? in a few weeks you're five percent more effective? Anyone in any field from banking to bioinformatics would think you were joking or a scam artist if you offered them 5% more efficient outcomes at that price.
Regarding OG editors like ed and ex and sam and stuff? I can absolutely believe that someone with a lifetime mastery of one of those tools could smoke a VSCode user, it's not at all obvious that VSCode is an upgrade to vim/etc. along any dimension other than low barrier to entry. ditto emacs which is about 1000x more powerful than vscode and the difference in library/extension ecosystem is not measured by size: the emacs one is identical to the vscode one with bottom 90% by quality sliced off the vscode one.
And this stuff compounds, you get a bit better at the tools and you can read more code faster, read the right code faster, start moving the derivative of the derivative.
It's also extremely non-obvious that collaboration at the kinds of scales and complexities that make exceptional skills or experience in it a top 3-5 core competency for people doing most software. Study after study going back to Fred Brooks and the Mythical Man Month have demonstrated that relatively small teams of people who get along very well coordinated by a relatively small number of highly technical managers who take the offload on the high-complexity cross-org collaboration is the golden ticket. It's the same reason computers have dedicated routing tables in the NIC and that those things talk to even bigger and more specialized machines that do all routing all day: you don't want to scale O(n^M) with the communication overhead.
A hacker needs to work really well with their immediate team, and have a good dialog with a manager who is both technical (to understand the work) and who devotes a lot of energy to complex collaboration.