Why not? I'm only slightly trolling. This is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. We tell newbies that it's not possible to be productive in Notepad or gEdit, and then hand them a text editor that doesn't even write letters onto the screen when you type.

The key word here is actually editor. Of course notepad and similar work perfectly fine if all you are doing is monotonically outputting a stream of text. When you want to navigate it and make changes, however, they break down (in comparison with alternatives). For most of us, we spend more time editing than writing - even in greenfield development.

Right. That is what we should be telling newbies. Not, "It's not possible to be productive in Notepad."

For whatever it's worth, that is what I tell newbies when I demand they switch to "some kind of real editor". As it happens, I'm fairly nondenominational when it comes to which they use; though I certainly have my personal preferences my advice is usually to switch to the editor for which mentoring is most easily available to them.