A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer doesn't make the carpenter.
There's specific skill with being able to use tools well, but that's not what makes a programmer, guitarist or carpenter valuable.
A good guitar player or a good carpenter sure as shit know a good tool from a bad tool. Good tools are force multipliers and can can make somebody much better than without the tool.
Plus bad tools can actively keep people away from learning new things. A shitty soldering iron can absolutely convince somebody they suck at soldering. Sure a pro can make use of a shitty soldering iron but they won’t do it willingly and their output will be subpar. Same with cooking and bad knives. Same with anything.
The argument that “tools don’t make somebody good” is pretty silly. They absolutely do.
I disagree, but only because I'd rephrase what you're saying as "good tools are force multipliers for skilled people". You can give a beginner musician the most expensive guitar rig, and they'll still sound like a beginner.
I also never said what you're arguing against. The GP was essentially complaining that using vscode would hamstring their career because their skill would be in something Microsoft could take away. What I was trying to say is the reason programmers get paid isn't because they're good at using their IDE, it's because they're good at programming. I believe the GP's concern is misplaced.
Consider: Do you go to a restaurant because their chef uses expensive high-end knives, or because they have good food?
i wrote one of those comments specifically in response to your comment, in order to correct your misreading of mine, so you really have no excuse whatsoever for not having read it
i still have some keybindings in emacs from when i used visual c++ last millennium, and i'm probably using emacs in significant part because i started using lugaru epsilon in about 01989. since then i've also used vi, vim, idea, eclipse, nedit, and the f83 editor, but i keep ending up back in emacs sort of by default. and i think my level of flexibility on this count is far above average
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696512 for a more in-depth exploration of this
Oh, I'm sorry. The tools don't matter.
Is that why famous guitarists play only on specific expensive brands and professional carpenters have favorite instruments?
But that isn't true. Lots of famous guitarists play, and love, the cheap guitar they had before they made it big. Yeah they own lots of expensive guitars (because they like collecting guitars and are rich enough to do it). But they don't only play those.
Here is Satriani playing on a terribly setup guitar [1] His only comment at the end? Oh, that was a little painful.
IDEs are usually far more complex due to their vast feature sets and constant evolution. If guitars evolved and increased in complexity at the same rate as IDEs, we would've seen something absurd like James Hetfield wielding a 150-string monster guitar.
IDEs have become incredibly complex tools with features that go far beyond the original concept of text editing, while guitars have remained relatively consistent in their core design and function over decades.
We don't have to keep practicing typing "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" over and over again to master an IDE, while you have to play same tunes again and again to become a virtuoso. Experienced musicians often have a broader, more adaptable skill set and can change instruments, while IDE users might be more "locked in" to their preferred environment for various reasons.
I agree with your sentiment though - good programmers are good not because they've mastered their tools - they chose to master their tools because they are good programmers.
almost all pianos have more strings than that; the bottom octave or so have two strings each and the rest of the keys have three strings each, for a total of somewhere around 250 strings. pipe organs are routinely significantly more complex than that. but a lot of the elaboration in musical instruments doesn't take the form of increasing the number of parts; instead we have things like special varnishes, holes cut in particular shapes, special alloys for strings, tweaked electronic circuit designs, tweaked magnetic pickup designs, etc. i'm not sure it would be easier for a random person to learn how to make a stratocaster-competitive electric guitar than it would be for them to learn how to write an emacs-competitive ide
as for lazy dogs, i think it's common for both programmers and musicians to practice etudes, not just for instrument mastery (which is only a small part of the problem both in programming and in music). a typing class in eighth grade was enormously helpful to me in programming even though, as everyone knows, typing is only rarely the bottleneck in programming. and i think it's pretty common for programmers to spend time on practicing the effective use of one ide feature or another, watch screencasts of other programmers using them, buy books about particular ides, etc. check out https://www.vimgolf.com/challenges/9v0062d0773d000000000225 http://vimcasts.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDIQ17T3sRk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGrBHohIgQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p09i_hoFdd0 etc.