"So for now, I decided to abandon F# in favor of OCaml, spending yet another two weeks trying to set up a great work environment. [Eclipse screenshot] And there

"So for now, I decided to abandon F# in favor of OCaml, spending yet another two weeks trying to set up a great work environment. [Eclipse screenshot] And there it was." Reads to me like spent an extra two weeks on Eclipse. As for your other point, I specifically said that he'd learn enough vi or Emacs "to get by," not achieve equivalent productivity. However, he'd be coding in OCaml within a day or so, not two weeks (a total of four weeks, including his F# experiment) later. I understand the need to tweak the working environment to maximize productivity. I do so on a regular basis, and my .emacs.d/init.el and .zshrc files have evolved tremendously over the last ten years. There's a difference between spending an hour here and there, though, and two weeks. I would be inclined to fire a programmer who spent a total of four weeks mucking around trying different IDEs instead of turning out useful work.