I'm almost the same age as the personal computer. In the mid to late 80s, I used to go to the local Amiga store (in the US, though I'm aware they were very pop

I'm almost the same age as the personal computer. In the mid to late 80s, I used to go to the local Amiga store (in the US, though I'm aware they were very popular in Europe) and copy the Fred Fish disks there. That was how I was first exposed to a lot of Unix software, as ports to the Amiga on those disks. And so I've never really gotten over my disbelief in why anyone would want to use emacs or vi in the GUI age. I mean, it's the eighties, come on now, we have 4096 colors and stereo sound and proportional fonts and desktop computers. Speech synthesis! Sprites! Multiple resolutions on one monitor! Emacs made as much sense to me as a tape drive or teletype. And even so, emacs being compared to vi was itself incomprehensible, like comparing a ship of the line to a canoe. P.S. I can relate to creative solutions to lack of development software though - you know what you do when you can't get anything installed? Well, obviously MS Office has VBA, and you can do practically anything with that. Then there's vbscript, which allows scripts outside of specific applications. But then, there are (non-current) command line compilers for .NET, including C# and VB.NET. You just have to figure out how to manage builds and linking and deployment on your own...and working around all the more recent features which are missing. But it's possible! And all with pretty much universally present Windows tools.