jeff
vim users are better programmers
To vim, or not to vim, that is the question.
Where does one start, with the quantification of programmer skill? Well, lets first reduce the area of scope by omitting leadership along with soft skills from the discussion. A title more accurate, but less provocative, would be vim users are better technically.
Better technically? What does that even mean? English is imprecise and ambiguous afterall; let us now clarify.
Programming in vim, the independant variable; better at programming the dependant. The relationship, correlated. Causative? No. Then, the confounding variable?
curiosity
Curiosity indeed. This is nothing new. Curiosity begets excellence, independant of field1. Grounding the discussion in specifics, those who use IDEs and GUIs are more programming curious than a banker. Further, those who use vim and PDEs are placed further along the spectrum. This, is the essense of the claim2.
1: The central hypothesis omits the quantification between areas of expertise. Which area is better than the other, is, truly subjective and philosophical. It doesn't claim that backend engineers are better than frontend engineers; infra better than backend; programmers better humans than musicians. What it does claim is that for a given scope, curiosity begets excellence.
2: This claim applies to the average case. Constraints of real life like time and money may prevent a curious person to take the vim dive. This applies to any skill with a high learning curve. Learning how to program in rust, how to speak japanese, etc.