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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Not to drag on the OP but I really wonder about people who are the subject of these articles who supposedly migrate from x to y to z, because at least for me I'm still using emacs like I did 10 years ago. The things I focus on is more about doing work than what tool I'm using.

Do people really migrate or is this more about growth in a user-base? A higher rate of growth of one user-base relative to another user-base is not strictly due to people migrating (as if it's zerosum) but could be due to a tool capturing more new users, like junior developers and such. How often do people really migrate wrt tools they actually use for work?

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Exactly. I'd guess that a majority of VS Code users are relatively new to programming. Not to say that there aren't experienced people who have switched, especially among the TextMate/Sublime Text crowd, but the incredible growth in users? I think that's largely a result of new programmers choosing the same editor, not old programmers switching.

Don't know if I'm representative, but I've been using Visual Studio for C++ stuff for about 20 years and switched to "mostly VSCode" a few years ago. I guess the reason is that I never used more than 2..3% of Visual Studio's features. Some features in VSCode are a bit too bare bones (especially the debugger), but somehow the user interface makes a lot more sense to me, and most of the times it feels faster and more lightweight than Visual Studio (Visual Studio nowadays even shows a progress bar when loading a project).

Is that that much of a shift? VSCode probably isn't Visual Studio but isn't it related obviously. It would seem different if you migrated from Visual Studio to sublime or xcode or something.

There’s also a big swing of experienced people as well IME. This is partly what drives adoption by new people. There’s a connection there.

The only significant scale of migration I have personally seen is from Visual Studio to VS Code. That was in a Microsoft shop moving to a browser based UI.

Personally I still use vi/vim for just about everything and use language specific IDEs for anything only tackled occasionally (I'm product manager not a developer) because IDEs reduce friction and increase my productivity. Recently started using Thonny as python IDE not because I'm a noob (20 years python coding) but it makes jumping into python code ad hoc effortless compared to pycharm or others. YMMV

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