[shunyaekam]

Tangent:

I've been programming for many years, and the old VI vs Emacs inside-marker/debate about which one "real" programmers use has been a constant for the entire duration.

(Because it is only one of those two. Any other is out of the question.)

Anyway, how much of this, quite frankly, non-issue turned important geek status marker is *not* about cargo culting? The programmers back in the day, real or fake, had to use some editor, right? I'm sure they would have been happy to use any editor, as long as it was free.

The programming profession is, in my not so humble opinion, a commodity profession by now.

What I mean by commodity profession: Exactly what you need to know to be a web dev (to take a prominent example) is well-defined since long.

Caring about small things like this just corroborates my point.

I think it is time for all status-chasers (?) aged 20-something to stop caring about ridiculous geek markers such as debating terminal IDEs.

[abound]

I can't remember where I heard this, but the idea is that every hobby X is secretly more like four sub-hobbies:

1. People who like to do X

2. People who like to tinker with the stuff around X

3. People who like to talk about doing X

4. People who like to talk about the stuff around X

For X you can substitute biking, cars, whatever, but for this discussion, X is "programming".

1. Some people like to program

2. Some people like to tinker with shells and editors and languages and frameworks

3. Some people like to talk about programming

4. Some people like to talk about the tools of programming

Of course people don't fall neatly into one of these buckets for a given hobby, but we certainly tend towards some subset of them. Your "status-chasers" may just be folks who tend towards bucket #4 when it comes to software stuff.

[_jal]

> I think it is time for all status-chasers

You're more or less just telling people they should socialize less.

Get back to me once you've convinced people to stop arguing Ford vs. Chevy or Dodgers vs. Giants or Makita vs. Dewalt or....

[shunyaekam]

No, I'm saying that caring about VI vs Emacs is nothing else than high brow gatekeeping/in-group signaling.

[_jal]

You're right that it is in-group signaling[1]. But it is also socializing. Comparative-opinion jawboning passes time and serves as a social learning mechanism as well as an assortive signifier. That sort of thing is also, by volume, a huge fraction of interpersonal communication - much like gossip, it is a double-edged mechanism hard-wired into human behavior.

Like I said, let me know when your utopia has eliminated assortive signaling about sports, tools, accents, clothes, art, food, housing, hairstyles, schools, employers, sex, shoes, religion, cars, text-messaging background colors, music, politics... all of which is far more pervasive, and some of which has historically escalated into literal wars.

[1] I also personally agree that it is boring. I couldn't care less what editor people use unless they've configured it wrong in a way that messes up a repo I have to use, and even then only to the extent that I probably have to explain to them how to fix it.

[aleph_minus_one]

> You're more or less just telling people they should socialize less.

Which is in my opinion not a bad idea ;-) , but for many people getting rid of the habit of socializing is similarly hard as stopping smoking or stopping being an alcoholic.