| I've always wondered if the "hard productive way" as understood by conventional wisdom (using VIM, using a language like APL) is actually more productive. For this topic, I have in mind two exercises: First, get people to nominate "experts" in a language, and assign them a straightforward task, and see who is actually faster using their native environments with code completion, language servers, etc. by systematically running these trials. Second, get people untutored in each language of similar experience, randomly assign them to a language, give them a not short but not long period of time, then do a similar exercise as above. The first has problems with assuring there is skill balance between the groups, but would I think tell you about how productive one can be in each language. The second would have good causal inference properties, but probably not tell you about the downstream effects of learning something hard with great rewards (e.g., vim or emacs). I'd bet there are marginal gains to APL (or vim) but probably nothing that matters in long-term productivity. However, I do think people underrate how fun it can be to "get good" at things like vim or APL, and I think that has really positive knock-on effects. |