alt Hacker NewsI think your analogy breaks down because lots of people don't program "anything and everything". I can relate to being considered quite an expert in certain programming domains among my peers, but there being all kinds of potential programming around me that I just don't find interesting at all.
Programming is also so much broader than something like cooking. It would be like saying that "you make your living manipulating matter, how could you not want to manipulate all that other matter?" to a chef. Their cooking doesn't necessarily make them want to mend clothes, remodel houses, devise new pharmaceuticals, etc.
Yeah, sure analogies are... well... some made up shit we use, because we have imagination. And the imagination can take you for a spin.
I just disagree with why Emacs heavy users are often "blamed" to be obsessed with their tools "needlessly". What does it even mean to desire "as little maintenance as possible"? Okay, let's say I don't use Emacs (which is like I dunno over 90% of existing programmers in the world). What, I won't be writing bash scripts for my work? Okay, maybe I really hate Bash. Python then? Lua? Perl? What the hell are we even talking about? Of course, a programmer will do these things. Every programmer does. There's not a single case where a programmer doesn't tweak, re-tweak, personalize, improve, readjust their tooling, their scripts, browser extensions, the set of apps they use. Why is it Emacs and Vim considered a "perpetual maintenance", and I dunno, VSCode is "it just works™"? That's just not true. If I didn't use Emacs, I'd be inevitably re-inventing some workflow automation in some different way. Or what, bash-scripts ain't no software?