He mentions vi/emacs. I am pretty much in love with vim, and I anticipate never using another editor for my daily work. This will certainly prevent me from discovering the joys of Microsoft's latest toolchain. On the other hand, I think it makes a much wider world of programming accessible because of the richness of the Unix world.

I freely admit that being very familiar with older tools and paradigms will make me unfairly biased against new approaches that may in fact be objectively better. But network effects being what they are, I'm not particularly keen on striking out after novel approaches (Plan 9 sounds like a massive improvement on Unix paradigms, but whose got the time?).

Of course I don't really have a problem shipping. I tend to keep my eye on the ball, sharpening tools only as an occasional distraction, so I guess the article isn't directed at me.