I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-style environments, but you're just not as likely to use them if the experience is somewhat scuffed.
As a sidenote I wonder if he's ever used Pharo, it seems like the kind of thing he'd like.
Same here, sort of. I've been using like 30 IDEs throughout my life, and chose emacs over vim during the period I was trying to stay within the terminal, but VSCode is the best IDE I've ever used period.
30 IDEs seems like a lot. Could you share why have you switched between so many? Could you list several specific points that make VSCode preferable over emacs.
I guess I’ve been programming since I was very young, so I went through a lot of horrible things like frontpage, dreamweaver, notepad++, and then a number of them per language (phpstorm, and other php IDEs, java IDEs, etc.)
The biggest selling point for me for vscode is good defaults (I like vanilla configurations to get started fast on new machines) and discoverability. I want to be able to install 10 plugins and try all of them in a few minutes, and learn shortcuts as I use the plugin (with emacs each extension is an investment)
I found use-package, try elisp packages make it easy to try new packages in emacs.