My understanding of the comment is that the commenter makes the point that VS is almost too comfortable (sorry if I'm mis-reading this), and that comfort is act

My understanding of the comment is that the commenter makes the point that VS is almost too comfortable (sorry if I'm mis-reading this), and that comfort is actually a hindrance to learning things. I see it where I teach, the students that come in are most comfortable with windows + VS and they are productive in this environment. However, after just one course in C programming using vim, the students have a much greater appreciation of the process of producing software. They gain an understanding of compiling and linking, Makefiles and automated builds. (I'm not sure all of them like vim + make, but they see where VS is automating stuff for them and I think this is a valuable thing to learn). Do you need this understanding to be a productive programmer? Of course not and indeed learning it is a bit of a timesink compared to getting your features finished. Eventually like most things it is horses for courses (it doesn't make sense to me to develop C# code using vim as you have the worlds best(tm) IDE to help you), but personally I feel that IDEs have become too much of a crutch, they help so much that you can be productive without knowing what you are doing and, this maybe elitist, I feel this harms the industry a little. Good programmers will always be good programmers, bad programmers can hide with an IDE, they have to learn what they are doing when dropped into vim + make (or other lo-fi tools of choice).