Will Emacs make me a better programmer? [closed]

Answer 1

Is there a measurable difference in skill, productivity, or programming enjoyment between people who depend on IDEs and those who don't, or is it all just fanboyism?

I don't think you could really get an answer to that. There are so many different ways to measure skill, productivity and programming enjoyment - and all of them are probably very subjective and/or can't be broken down into ONE thing causing it or not.

It's still an interesting question tho.

My personal belief is - it depends on the programmer :)

G-Man

Answer 2

IMHO IDEs tend to be optimised around a specific platform or language or OS: Eclipse JDT is great for Java, Visual Studio is C++/.NET-centric, etc. They help productivity a lot (again IMHO) if you're only working on that platform, but if you change platforms you have to basically learn a new IDE (or at least a new set of plugins, views, perspectives and I don't know what else for Eclipse).

The advantage of knowing emacs, or Textmate, or vim (my personal preference), or any generic editor, is that the skills you acquire in that editor apply regardless of what platform you're writing for. They're optimised for editing text, and once you master them, you can edit text very efficiently in any language.

There's also Yegge's assertion that great programmers adapt their tools to their working style rather than vice versa. I think this is a win for generic editors, because you customise one editor, rather than having to work out how to adapt four different IDEs to all behave the way you want.

Answer 3

I believe its a large misconception that using these text based editors such as VI and Emacs are looked highly upon or needed to become a "great programmer". I always felt IDE's are mor e powerful then they use to be, and it truly comes down a preference and style.

Answer 4

He (Steve Yegge) has elaborated on this, in bits in pieces, in other postings of his. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html is probably the most comprehensive, but the info is buried in there since it's on a tangent to the main subject.

I guess to summarize: the programmers who are merely good or competent will pick up an IDE and get to know it really well, and maybe do decently enough in it, but they'll restrict themselves to what the IDE provides for them. In other words, they adapt themselves to the IDE. The great programmers, on the other hand, will adapt their environment to suit themselves, in such ways as writing scripts or their own tools, or extending their tools. And to that last point, not only Emacs is the most extensible environment there is, it is also the easiest environment to extend there is, and it is the environment where you reap the most benefit from extending it--your extensions integrate into Emacs like they are stock features, and so your future extensions may build upon your previous ones (positive-feedback-loop kind-of thing).

Answer 5

With the quoted text beginning "All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs," I wouldn't take it at face value either. Does he know all of the world's greatest engineers? Is it the same list of world's greatest engineers that you or I have?

Once learned, a powerful editor like EMACS or vi will make you more efficient, or at least more efficient if you happen to be caught without your favorite IDE.

It's the "once learned" part that's the killer. It's a lot of work and practice to use these tools productively, and it's very tough at the beginning.

Answer 6

Yegge needs to meet Bill Joy. Not only is he one of the great programmers in the world, he also wrote large chunks of vi. In vi.

Short Shameful Confession: After 20 years of using vi (and vim/gvim in recent years) for everything, in the last year or so I've started using Eclipse for java editing (and Thunderbird for email), although at my current job my machine has so little memory that I usually use vi except when I need the debugger.