I can accept that there are valid reasons to do this, but I couldn't work in a shop like that. The bottom line is I invest in my tools, and a big part of my career development is mastering standard unix tools. I don't expect to be doing Rails work 10 years from now, but I'll definitely be using vim + bash for the long haul.
This specific question is talking about Eclipse, and depending on the language they are using it might be they are moving the build system to eclipse, so they are mandating everyone use the tool. I think in the FOSS world we are a little spoiled that we have options like what editor / build system / OS we would like to use to develop on. I know there are a lot of shops that on day one you are given access to Visual Studios and that's the last tool you will use at that company for anything. So this isn't anything extraordinary that is being asked of the employee. I know where I work we develop on remote system's and while some people prefer to do a lot of upfront work in eclipse, when testing on the production equipment your left with nothing but a command line. So knowledge of at least one text line editor and gcc/make is fundamental for anyone who wants to work with us. I could totally see someone coming in with the complete opposite question.<p>"My company is mandating that everyone use vim and make"<p>And still see it as a valid request of an employer.
Jungo (<a href="http://jungo.com/" rel="nofollow">http://jungo.com/</a>), a company where I first learned the "proper" development process with code reviews etc, had instituted Vim as the company wide editor. You <i>could</i> choose something else if you still could work reasonably in vim and mastered that "other" editor to a high degree, being able to do x,y,z things with it. There was an actual document describing required level of mastery ;)<p>Now, vim being one of the top productive environments (only probably be contested by emacs), and the fact that we worked in C, so stags vim plugin provided as much IDE-ness you could get anywhere else at the time (2000), I think that was a very reasonable requirement. Eclipse? nah, not really, you can pry VIM from my dead hands, definitely would not work at this place.
Where I work people do a variety of things. We mostly use VS but I like to hit F5 and have it do an incremental build and start the debugger but most everyone else builds through a command line tool they created and have a VS extension that automatically attaches to certain processes when you fire them up. It's not uncommon at all for people who are not building via visual studio to break the build for people who are not. The main checkin gate of course does it the same as the command line people so it can be very ugly when everyone is doing a variety of things. They can end up breaking your system inadvertently.
that's what I did in my team, I want people to be able to sit next to each other, I want shared formatting settings, I don't want them to do the formatting by hands, and we have shared ownership of the code. You can only change the formatting style after discussing it with the others.
I want people to remove my personal style after me, and I want to remove other's personal style in the code. Adding dependencies or libraries has to be debatted and if possible each new library should delete another one, the same with lines of code.
I call it "trying to control the entropy".
This question lacks a lot of details, what tech is being used, how experienced the team is, what the build and deploy environments are like, what level of syntax consistency is needed for various reasons etc..<p>While many programmers are religious about their tool chain there are very legitimate reasons for wanting a standardized dev environment especially with an IDE that does things like syntax homogenization for you. Without more details it's impossible to tell weather this specific individual case would really benefit from the mandate in spite of upsetting the comfort of their devs.