I think you guys are missing the point. A good text editor has nothing to do with notepad (I think notepad++ isn't a satisfactory improvement). I work daily with SublimeText, and I assure you I'm more productive and learned a lot than when I used Visual Studio/C#. Like your coworker, I defended a platform change in our company. We have successfully migrated our C# solution, that ran only in Windows, in a Django/Python service. I had fights with my teammates at the time, it wasn't a soft transition, but there's a lot of advantages, we ship code better and faster than never. I doubt that anyone code in Visual Studio faster than an expert vim programmer. I've seen one of them in a Google keynote about Angular.js, they are insanely fast. There's no reason to develop a serious application in a closed platform, which project itself is a great failure (they copied the JIT compiler thing from Java, except that Java does it because it's multiplatform, opposed to .NET -- Mono is buggy and very very unofficial). The worst part is that a single company that controls everything. The best thing that happened to software development was open source, an having a good community around it makes the difference The community around C# is poor, partially because they can't have a role in the language/framework development. "Open source" doesn't mean I'm saying "linux rules windows sucks", I'm talking about reusing code/components from someone else. You do it everyday, except that the guys who write the code you reuse are Microsoft employees pressed to keep old standards, the code that I use are from passionated developers around the world.