Of course MS Windows is better It has Visual Studio

The two main arguments are:

1) C# needs more boilerplate class code than C++ or other languages. Wrong. It definitely needs less boilerplate code than C++ and is close to Python and Ruby.

2) C# and Visual C++ have huge class libraries, which makes it impossible to use without an IDE. I'm sorry, but I would always go for the language with the big class library, rather than the one without it. Also, C++ has fairly hefty Unix libraries, too.

I guess the real problem is sour grapes. For languages other than Microsoft's and Java (and maybe Lisp - I don't know), there aren't any good IDEs, which really understand your code, are stable and bug-free, and provide useful refactoring tools (e.g., change the name of a method and update all of its invocations). For one, the lack of a good IDE and toolchain really does reduce efficiency in large projects (although I would guess the average Rails project is not that large). It also steepens the learning curve. While learning Scala I've spent ours trying to find a mistake in a single line, which neither the IDE nor the compiler could reasonably point out, but Visual Studio would have explained right away.

As somebody who has hacked code with both notepad and batch files and various IDEs, I can say unequivocally that that most IDEs are configurable enough to win hands down.

Pick a feature, and you can either find an IDE that comes with it out of the box or easily code one up. Good IDEs are a superset of good text editors.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this didn't look like too good an article. It looked like a big morass with "Paul Graham" stuck in about half-way down, no doubt triggering the auto-feed into HN. (grin)

So does the author suggest anyone working with Java or C# should quit their job?

Or does working with vim also provide you with an alternate space-time continuum which allows you to "just" spend one year doing doing something else entirely without it affecting the world around you and the requirements that you have a job which needs to get done?

I used Visual Studio for a week for a small project and got so sick of its interface that I ended up using it solely for the "compile" button (since the project had to use the Visual C compiler).

The Visual C compiler has its own problems: for example, it is completely incapable of maintaining stack alignment, which required us to write a rather large workaround in the x264 code to disable all functions that depend on stack alignment when compiling with MSVC. Its lack of C99 support is also rather aggravating and gnaws at me every day when I find out that I have to reorganize the code I just wrote because I can't do something like declare a variable somewhere other than the top of a function. It all makes me want to throw away support for MSVC completely, but there oddly enough still seem to be people who try to compile x264 with it...

In summary, there seems to be this arrogant attitude among Windows programmers that the UNIX programmers don't use their tools because they're being "elitist"... but in reality, they don't use the tools because they don't like them. And there's plenty of good reasons not to like them.

(Which strikes me as odd--I've always found Windows programmers to be on average more elitist than *nix programmers--the former insists that their single IDE is unquestionably the best, while the latter will recommend dozens of editors, saying that you should pick the one you like most.)