Oliver Steele writes an excellent article on language mavens vs tool mavens, or: do you use Emacs/Vim+insert obscure language of your choice here vs do you use a mainstream language such as C#/Java with an excellent supporting IDE, such as Visual Studio or Eclipse? (Or maybe you use a mainstream language without any sort of IDE, in which case you’re doing yourself a great disservice.) Two quotes I liked from the article:

Why canít one be a language maven and a tool maven? Itís hard. One reason is that developers have limited time, especially for learning new skills. You can use any given block of time to master language features, or to master development tools … in fact, the most powerful languages may initially have the least powerful tool support. The reason for this is that the language developer, like the language adopter, has to make a choice: whether to dedicate limited development resources towards language features, or towards tool support.

Kudos to the Lambda community for finding the article.