Re: CAD software, I would consider them more productive, but only if they actually knew what the basics were and didn't just depend on the GUI doing all the work. If you can't get underneath the tooling and fix it, then I don't want to work with you, period.
Being tied to a single effective tool is not always bad. If the tool is indeed powerful, the need for other tools may not arise. Emacs and Vim users use their editors to work on a lot of different things, for example, and have enormous libraries of plugins and features at their disposal, ready to use no matter the language.
If someone asked me whether to learn an IDE for a specific language or Emacs, I'd say both. The larger your selection of tools, the better - with more tools the number of things you can do faster/better also increases, which leads to higher productivity.
In other words - don't try to code in Notepad forever and be prepared to spend some time on learning new tools.
I basically have to have the documentation open in a separate window at all times, because Command-Click hardly works, and syntax highlighting/completion is never long for this world.
At least Notepad doesn't have pretensions to being a programmer tool.
To be fair - XCode is a problem.
iPhone Apps are not rocket science.
There is no reason for the massive bureaucracy and confusion of XCode - or even Swift.
Not only does Swift try to do too much as a language - dealing with XCode is like dealing with the California DMV.
My god, man the compiler options. Pages and pages of options.
As far as I'm concerned, the biggest failure of the 'Swift' decision, was to be so tied to the old language standard, and to XCode.
The only possible advantage of XCode from a developer perspective is maybe the UI designer, but even then.
Obviously there's a huge investment in Xcode
But ...
Has anyone tried VSCode lately, or Atom? I mean it's possibly to have a 'light' editor and basic compile chain in which we can do powerful things. Or none at all.
I personally loathe using Android Studio or XCode - it feels like working for the government, on a team of 3000 people building a web-site for the local library that never gets into production. Anyhow, I jest.
I think there is rationality in wanting to be able to have a language work without an IDE.
But if I can "write" an 80 character line of code by pressing around 10 keys, I think that's pretty useful. If I can write a method, a class, faster than I would by manually typing and referring to docs all the time, why wouldn't I?
And clearly I'm still getting the work done. I'm complaining about the dissonance of trying to type a method name while the autocomplete dialog wants me to finish the name of a random C macro or an image name. It's frustrating and worth complaining about. Syntax highlighting is useful, the reason it exists is to help you differentiate tokens quickly.
Also nobody is saying that the tool is required to make you productive. The entire point is that it makes you more productive. I consider things like "What file is this datatype defined in?" to be menial work. It's merely a waste of time that requires no skills.