I was going to let this go

It's almost 2016. Let's stop telling newbies to learn #Emacs or Vim, or any other "1337" command line shit. https://t.co/RiOg03tLhG #elitism — Niko Rosvall (@NikoRosvall) December 13, 2015

but it kept bothering me so here we are.

I don’t understand this attitude and I find it insulting not only to those who have bothered to master their tools but also to younger engineers who are assumed to be too stupid or lazy to do the same.

If you want a best-in-class editor then you take the effort to learn Emacs, Vim, or perhaps one or two others. You don’t declare that Notepad++ is good enough and you certainly don’t, if you know what you’re talking about, declare that Notepad++ won the Vim/Emacs holy war.

Today’s younger engineers are not, in any real sense, kids. Nor are they special snowflakes that need to be protected from the disciplines of our profession. If you want to be more than today’s equivalent of yesteryear’s “Web specialists” that ran scripts to build rudimentary Web sites, then you better learn and master the basic tools. That means learning some language in addition to Javascript, moving beyond Eclipse, and getting comfortable with the command line.

Call me a dinosaur but if your idea of software engineering is pushing a button to generate great glops of code that you don’t understand then your idea of our profession is very different from mine.