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Comment by dan00 | Hacker News Reader

> So for me the question is why there are still people that enjoy working as if their computers are using a 25 year old developer experience.

For me it's the question, why it's so hard to understand that people have different likings without to downgrade them?

Everyone thinks that his/her decisions are the most sensible ones, but in most cases they aren't.

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It often _is_ the most sensible choice, _for them_. The problem is, not everyone is doing the same job in the same environement, and they have a hard time realizing that. Their empathy/imagination stays too close to their own experience.

... the same job in the same environment coming from the same background. If you've spent 5 years at university training yourself in vim or emacs, it makes sense to keep using that; if you've started on the job with jEdit or whatnot, it's hard to justify giving up high productivity for several years for some random promise of even-better riches down the line.

What does jEdit give you that you couldn't learn in Emacs in a day or two? Basic text editing is pretty straight forward to learn in Emacs. The part that takes time is learning all the other cool features, and that can be done gradually over time without giving up immediate productivity.

jEdit uses java-like beanshell for scripts, which is pretty different from elisp. So now you have to rewrite all your custom macros in a language you don't know and with an entirely different paradigm. But tbh, it's just an example -- any advanced workflow will require some time to adjust, for benefits which are hard to quantify.

Tried switching from QWERTY to DVORAK recently? Same thing.

>For me it's the question, why it's so hard to understand that people have different likings without to downgrade them?

Because while everyone can have this or that preferences, personal taste is not the be all end all argument, except in the "it's a free country" way.

Whenever we want to assess the state of our tools, and what we need to make them better etc, we need to reach an agreement beyond "works for me" and personal taste.

Who's "we"? If someone reaches a maximum of productivity using an editor made in the 70's, who is anyone else to tell them otherwise?

Preferred tooling for reaching maximum productivity is an inherently personal thing - you may do your best in emacs, the other guy in vi, yet someone else in Sublime3 on Windows. Nobody is qualified to make broad sweeping judgments as to what works best for everyone.

A few try, and some inferences can be made to the lowest common denominator (see modern UI design practices), but if we're talking productivity for the super-literate user, then no, absolutely not.

People usually claim that one thing is more productive than the other without any real evidence. I think it's mostly just so we can stick with something out of familiarity. Or sometimes it's so we can switch to something else because we're bored. The "it feels right to me" argument just seems unbeatable (you can't argue with it without seeming like a jerk).

For example, I might say that I'm super productive in IDE X, but I don't know for sure that I couldn't be more productive in IDE Y or Editor Z with various plugins. I haven't consulted any research in making my decision nor have I conducted any real research of my own.

I guess maybe it doesn't matter. If everyone is "happy", maybe that's good enough. But I see people struggling to do certain things in their environment of choice and that ends up having an effect on not just them but potentially their coworkers.

But that's an unknown right? You may or may not be more productive in IDE Y, but making the effort to find that out takes more time, your most precious resource, for something that may not even turn out to be true, and then your investment is wasted.

I think this is why people tend to make the broad statements about "X is better than Y" since they only have their own experience to go on, but without full knowledge of how someone else's mind works, it's a fool's errand. Even if changing tools would solve the things you can observe and attach a "time wasted doing X" quantity, you don't know if they won't struggle with something else after changing.

> but making the effort to find that out takes more time

This is always true, in every domain. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. I think it's worth some amount of effort to find out, but at some point, you have to settle on something and move on.

Personally, I used to be an emacs user, then switched to Eclipse with some emacs keybindings, then learned vim after many years of being frustrated by it, and now use an IDE with a vim plugin (and occasionally straight vim). I feel like I've settled on the best of all worlds... for _me_ at least.

> I think it's mostly just so we can stick with something out of familiarity.

That's the single best reason to stick with something as personal as an editor. Emacs, for example, has all of the features of other IDEs but with a different interface. Want to single-step through a debugger? Got it! Refactor Java? Got it! Syntax highlight 1,373 file format you've never heard of? Oh, definitely got it!

Given that for literally any feature I've seen in other IDEs and wanted to try, Emacs has already had it for a decade, I just don't have an incentive to learn a wholly different workflow.

It could be true that I could make beautiful music on a guitar, but my piano skills satisfy my music requirements. I've played a guitar long enough to enjoy it and I see the appeal, but I like playing the piano more. Both would allow me to express my intent, but I can do it more easily with the interface I've been using for several decades. Why do people keep insisting I pick up a guitar?

BTW, I had this conversation with a manager once. He wanted me to use Eclipse for Python - Python! - development and kept giving me serious grief about my "ancient" Emacs setup. We was quite serious about it, too. I finally prevailed upon him to STFU and let me work with this logic: "Are you happy with my output? You are? Great. That means Emacs works for me. I'm done talking about this."

I wish that were an exaggeration, but I really had to have this conversation with a higher-up. If I'm using Notepad but still able to get my work done on schedule and meeting our quality requirements, then back off.

>Who's "we"? If someone reaches a maximum of productivity using an editor made in the 70's, who is anyone else to tell them otherwise?

Unless they work for themselves, that "anyone" can be: colleagues, supervisors, bosses, teachers, and even clients, and also industry experts and seasoned pros telling best practices.

>Preferred tooling for reaching maximum productivity is an inherently personal thing - you may do your best in emacs, the other guy in vi, yet someone else in Sublime3 on Windows.

And yet tooling is regulated all the time in all kinds of companies.

And all kinds of people mistakenly think they are more productive with X, where they would be with Y. People make bad tooling decisions all the time. For those people it's perfectly OK for others to tell them what they should use.

The question was not about regulation - of course you can tell anyone to do whatever nonoptimal bullshit you want if you have power over them.

I'm asking what gives anyone the ability to make a correct judgment about tools and productivity?

>I'm asking what gives anyone the ability to make a correct judgment about tools and productivity?

Extended experience (compared to someone who've only used X, someone who has extensively used X,Y and Z editors trumps them).

Besides, some people have so narrow a view, that almost anybody even a little experienced can immediately tell (correctly) that they are not using the correct tools. E.g. people coding with Notepad...

Also, science. E.g. statistical tests with control groups et al, with teams using A or B editor, and checking for speed of writing code, number of bugs, impediments to workflows, etc.

Your extended experience is valid only for you because it represents your biases for the way your mind works. It is not valid for the larger population.

To my knowledge, no such scientific statistical tests exist with a large enough sample size.

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