Over at the Triplebyte Blog there’s an interesting post on editors, who uses them, what languages their users code in, and how their users did in their interviews. By now you’ve undoubtedly heard about that last aspect: Emacs and Vim users significantly outperform the users of other editors in their interviews. Emacs users performed over twice as well as its nearest competitor.
After we enjoy a moment of triumphalism, it’s worth asking what those results mean. Triplebyte speculates that it’s because Emacs and Vim have been around a long time and are therefore more apt to be used by experienced engineers. The problem is that users of the new hotness in editors, Visual Studio Code, also performed well in the interviews.
So what is the reason then? No one believes—or, at least, should believe—that using Emacs or Vim somehow makes you a better engineer. As Aaron Hall tweeted:
correlation doesn’t imply causation…
[deep #emacs and #statistics thoughts] https://t.co/RM209X51Md
— Aaron Hall, 🐍 Professor, NYC, 🇺🇸 (@aaronchall) December 7, 2018
That’s true, of course, but what I’m pretty sure is going on here is that the same attributes that make for great engineers predispose them to be Emacs or Vim users. I’ve explored this before in my Using Emacs post where I discuss those attributes. Those who are concerned enough about efficiency and creating workflows that are as frictionless as possible tend to choose the best tools possible—not the prettiest ones—and be willing to put in the time to master their them. That’s true of younger engineers as well as more experienced ones. If you think that argument’s facile, consider that just today I saw a tweet saying that the writer was giving up on learning Org-mode because he wasn’t smart enough. Not everyone can or is willing to put in the time to master Emacs.
The Triplebyte post is really interesting and looks at the data in several ways but it’s probably a mistake to read too much into the results. So enjoy a moment or two of feeling superior and then get back to work.