It's like saying "What modern olympic gold medal runners prefer Adidas shoes over Nike?", with the implication that Adidas shoes are inferior in some way.
They are olympians, you're not. Use whatever shoes you want to use.
Tooling does matter, but what "legendary programmers" tooling looks like doesn't outside of a professional curiosity.
Legendary programmers don’t become legendary because of their text editors but because of the code that they write.
Linus Torvalds has used a janky version of micro Emacs that he picked up as a university student in Finland.[1] Will it make you a better programmer if you switch to his editor? No. Just use whatever you are comfortable with, like he has. He has used this editor because he got used to its peculiar keybindings. He rather worked on the kernel than to learn new keybindings.
Andreas kling of serenityOS uses clion, and makes good use of its features. He's an awesome programmer, and no doubt proficient in vim if he needs to be, but seeing him interact with the IDE does shown its use, especially with the speed he operates at.
25 years ago I was using a mix of Visual Studio and Emacs. 25 years later I use Emacs a bit but don’t write much code. I use BBEdit more than Emacs now.
> My name is Kamil Dębowski (or Errichto) and I'm quite good at competitive programming. I'm a finalist of multiple big programming competitions like ICPC, Facebook Hacker Cup and Google Code Jam (even got 2nd place in 2018). I also organize competitions, which means inventing and preparing problems.
Not sure if they still use Geany, or if you consider this person legendary (some people really gatekeep around words like that), but there's at least a data point for you.
That's for competitive programming, you really want to stick with the most common tools there. Otherwise you have to learn different set of stuff for each on-site competition. Common as in "included in the standard OS image at competitions".
For example, I use Far Manager/Kate for competitive programming and small scripts (sometimes Vim), but not way I use any of these for professional development.
Trying to understand this--are Far Manager & Kate included in the standard OS image at competitions, but your favorite work IDE is not? Or is it more that your work config files & plugins are not available/needed in competitions?
Yes. In some competitions about ten years ago in ex-USSR it was typically Windows + Far Manager (maybe some other stuff, but not always), in international competitions it was some flavor of Linux with a stock KDE (hence Kate) or GNOME (hence Gedit).
No professional IDEs almost certainly (no license to use), and the set of free IDEs depends on what organizers like: some installed NetBeans, some installed Eclipse CDT, some did both, some did neither.
No external resources like configs and plugins are typically allowed either.
Of course, it depends on a competition. I'm mostly talking about IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics for school students) and ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest). Online competitions are another beast.
From what I gather, Zuckerberg used emacs, so unless that information is wrong, then he would not be a responsive answer to this question. Thanks anyway
If “legendary programmers” all chiseled bits into a disk with a scalpel would that make it a good idea?
Use whatever makes you comfortable and allow others to do the same. Don’t emulate or even care about “legendary programmers” tooling.