Ridiculous. Taking a month to learn Ruby is so vastly different than taking a month to learn vim that it defies comparison. One actually has the potential to give you an order of magnitude productivity gain while the other will do so little for you that you might as well call it nothing.
Let's exaggerate in order to enhance the effect.
Both you and I launch new startups to produce exactly the same web software product.
We both get programmers who have zero experience with vim and Ruby. Let's say they only know PHP and only know how to use Notepad++. No frameworks.
I have my programmers go to Ruby class and learn Ruby on Rails for a month.
You have them learn vim for a month. They get to stay with PHP.
Not fair? One is a framework designed to speed time to market while the other is just a text editor? Exactly!
Who do you think will see the greatest productivity gains in a month?
In six months?
Who will ship product first?
Who will ship product with more features?
Who will ship product with less bugs?
Who will go out of business?
Who will get fired by the board?
Right.
Or, let's take a different route:
Our investors just gave us a million dollars each for these startups.
I go to mine and propose that I want to have the entire team take a month to learn RoR due to the productivity and code quality gains we are going to be able to derive by taking this approach.
You go to yours and tell them that you want your team to spend a month learning vim because it takes too long to go from home row to the arrow keys and you can shave seconds while editing.
Sign-up for YC and tell PG that you are going to have your entire team go learn vim for a month instead of something that delivers real productivity gains that are orders of magnitude greater.
Who gets fired?
Again. Right.
When you measure what really matters just about any argument for vim is as hollow as can be.
> Let's exaggerate in order to enhance the effect.
Let's not, they are entirely irrelevant.
Noone is claiming that any specific tool will make your startup succeed, or fix your bugs, or add features to your software for you - I thought we were discussing text editors.
I don't know what you are discussing. I am discussing the absolute fact that focusing on any real or imaginary gains that could be had by insisting on using any editor at all is ridiculous in the context of where the real problems are in developing software products.
Let's exaggerate in order to enhance the effect.
Both you and I launch new startups to produce exactly the same web software product.
We both get programmers who have zero experience with vim and Ruby. Let's say they only know PHP and only know how to use Notepad++. No frameworks.
I have my programmers go to Ruby class and learn Ruby on Rails for a month.
You have them learn vim for a month. They get to stay with PHP.
Not fair? One is a framework designed to speed time to market while the other is just a text editor? Exactly!
Who do you think will see the greatest productivity gains in a month?
In six months?
Who will ship product first?
Who will ship product with more features?
Who will ship product with less bugs?
Who will go out of business?
Who will get fired by the board?
Right.
Or, let's take a different route:
Our investors just gave us a million dollars each for these startups.
I go to mine and propose that I want to have the entire team take a month to learn RoR due to the productivity and code quality gains we are going to be able to derive by taking this approach.
You go to yours and tell them that you want your team to spend a month learning vim because it takes too long to go from home row to the arrow keys and you can shave seconds while editing.
Sign-up for YC and tell PG that you are going to have your entire team go learn vim for a month instead of something that delivers real productivity gains that are orders of magnitude greater.
Who gets fired?
Again. Right.
When you measure what really matters just about any argument for vim is as hollow as can be.