I don't even understand how people can have this argument. I mean, how many people have actually invested enough time into both vi and emacs to meaningfully compare them? I doubt there are that many. Really, either one is a fine choice and will probably be able to handle all your coding needs, once it's customized to your liking.

Do evil-mode users count?

No! Stop! What are you doing? We're already battered enough as it is; we can't afford yet another breach of the vi/Emacs cease-fire.

No GNOME vs. KDE either, or language wars. While they do demonstrate the general "haters gonna hate" principle, they're not strictly back end.

Probably should have thrown in something about systemd, though. ;)

don't get them started :)

Actually they are comparable. Someone starting out in programming needs an editor, and they are two of the options you have to choose between. Simply saying that they are not comparable doesn't help that person decide which environment to use.

I should also point out that in theory vimsh is just as powerful a programming language as Elisp. People don't use them the same way, but you theoretically can.

> I should also point out that in theory vimsh is just as powerful a programming language as Elisp. People don't use them the same way, but you theoretically can.

That's a bit of a Turing tarpit, though. A one-instruction computer can compute any function, too, but I wouldn't want to use it.

Likewise, vimsh isn't awful, but it's not a general-purpose language (elisp has a lot of warts at this point, but it is general-purpose, even if it wouldn't be my first choice for anything but extending emacs) and it's Yet Another Language; at elisp is a Lisp (which is a virtue).