This article basically attempts to discredit the maxim that 'The three most “personal” choices a developer makes are language, tool, and OS.' The author posits

This article basically attempts to discredit the maxim that 'The three most “personal” choices a developer makes are language, tool, and OS.' The author posits that these shouldn't be 'personal' choices, rather a programmer should just choose the right tool for the job. However, I think he fails to take into consideration that some choices are 'sticky' (in the economic sense) because of external efficiency boosts. For example, Eclipse may be a better Java IDE than Emacs, ceteris paribus. However, all things are not equal. By using Emacs with JDEE I get free svn integration, my keybindings, my customizations, and so on. All those things would take considerable time to set up/learn on Eclipse. Similarly, I can imagine certain tasks for which OCaml may be better suited than CL or Perl (my two strongest languages). But, I may have enough additional expertise in Lisp or Perl to offset the 'natural' advantage OCaml would offer. (This isn't to suggest that we shouldn't push our comfort zones and expand our skills, though). It's a basic principle that specialization often leads to efficiency increases. And, since the decision of what to specialize in (Emacs v Vim, Ruby v Python, etc.) is effectively arbitrary, it boils down to a personal choice. I should learn the basics of both A and B (windows and linux, cl and scheme, etc), but at some point I should choose one to specialize in. And that choice is pretty personal.