Computer nerds showing off. The question asker's concern is valid. It's a very difficult process to become properly speedy at using vi. There's a huge cognitive cost involved in memorizing all those keyboard commands.
http://danielmiessler.com/study/vim
I go into a good amount of depth of how to get away from memorization and into thinking and having it happen.
In contrast, using emacs (which I have likely outed myself as a user of, via my above notation ;)) or vi require you to be more mindful (at first) of what you are doing while editing text. Both tools are likely to be frustrating if you don't think of things in a way that matches the worldview that each was built with.
To be a programmer, you have to learn a programming language. Learning an editor is easier than that. A lot of programmers probably don't invest the time to learn an editor, but it not much time in the long run, and it's worth learning your tools.