[californical]

Yeah I feel like this definitely skews the results. I’m experienced enough to nearly never use StackOverflow, and also experienced enough to want to use something robust and readily available (try to find a system that doesn’t have vim), so I stick with vim and am _incredibly_ happy with it.

Add in that StackOverflow is mostly a tool used by more junior web developers, and I think you’ll see that other demographics (like embedded, firmware, etc) would skew even more heavily in the direction of vim + no SO usage.

[59nadir]

The participants of the StackOverflow survey are likely not people who end up on StackOverflow randomly when looking for answers, but are more likely to be people who answer questions or are pulled in from other communities that link to the survey in progress (language subreddits, etc.). The actual programming community skews way more towards learners than an SO survey shows.

You can see here that there are more people with 5+ years experience than less:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-experience-yea...

For what it's worth I prefer NeoVim and I've programmed since 2001, I don't think experience or anything has much to do with this preference.

I also think that anyone who doesn't Google stuff (and let's be honest, you'll probably end up on a Stack Exchange sub-domain when you do) for their hobby or professional programming is likely very stagnant and probably way worse and less experienced than they ought to be, since they're probably just doing the same old stuff all the time.

P.S. It's trivial to find default installations that don't have Vim, I don't get how anyone who's installed desktop or server distros at this point can not remember being surprised about the absence of Vim and having to install either it or NeoVim. I remember it being almost a regular occurrence when setting up machines.

[qalmakka]

> try to find a system that doesn’t have vim

Lots of embedded and BSD systems only have old vi, not vim, out of the box though.

[davidatbu]

Thank you for explicitly stating the implications of what "...by the SO crowd" means. It wasn't obvious to me at all.