The bigger the company the more difficult this is. Where I worked our workstations were locked down and required a package request to install software. In addition, they would not bother packaging a new tool if it served the same purpose of other tools; i.e. text editors. Doesn't matter if you prefer Vim/emacs/Sublime Text 2/Notepad++, we already have a license for a text editor you've never heard of before.
Depending on the company's hardware VM performance could be a real issue. You'd be surprised how many developer jobs are done on old Windows XP boxes. Big companies typically do upgrades in multiyear cycles.
That quote is taken out of context and was written by someone who's first language is obviously not English. I took the paragraph to mean that Emacs users are possibly more technical because it attracts those who are curious enough to research less mainstream programming languages.
The entire paragraph is about Lisp if you read carefully. The mother tongue of the author is irrelevant, he clearly thinks that Lisp is a superior language for a possibly more intelligent coder:
Emacs is developed by Lisp whose syntax is different from common programming languages. A developer who is curious enough to try Lisp is possibly more intelligent than average. Lisp is often the third language he/she learns (Java/C/C# is the first, a script language like Bash/Python/Perl/Ruby is the second).
I prefer remapping capslock to control for easier use of commands like <C-f>, <C-b>, <C-e>, <C-h>, and <C-l> (all of which were absent in the example vimrc posted). Using the leader key makes total sense for dealing with splits and buffers or plugins you might want to look into some of the other Control based commands that Vim supports.
I use Ctrl-f and Ctrl-b (as well as Ctrl-e and Ctrl-y) pretty often, and you're right that there are no shortcuts for it in the provided example. Perhaps I should look into those as possible next targets. I guess I'm not entirely eliminating the Ctrl key from my vim usage (not that there's anything wrong with Ctrl, really), but you have a point.
I'm guessing I use Ctrl-e more often than :e - perhaps I should change that up.
There seems to be a lot of ringing endorsements for CapsLock as Ctrl in the comments.
I'm a little confused about this. He complains about Node violating separation of responsibility, and then about putting HTTP servers in front of Node. Would anyone with more sysadmin experience mind explaining what the drawbacks of this approach are compared to a more traditional setup?
Depending on the company's hardware VM performance could be a real issue. You'd be surprised how many developer jobs are done on old Windows XP boxes. Big companies typically do upgrades in multiyear cycles.