You're missing the point - if a new programmer has to learn vim or emacs first, chances are they just won't learn to program. What's next? Grow a neckbeard? It

You're missing the point - if a new programmer has to learn vim or emacs first, chances are they just won't learn to program. What's next? Grow a neckbeard? It's all about reducing the number of hoops that they have to jump through to get results. Once you get up to speed, sure, learn a decent editor. But in the meantime, use gedit - it's reasonably good (eg. has auto indent and syntax highlighting), free and available for pretty much everything. Or sign up for something like pythonanywhere.com.