His point is correct. There are better time investments than the editor. It actually took me a while to get into clojure because of editor issues. Eventually I settled on notepad++ (which unfortunately does not yet support clojure syntax highlighting; I use its lisp option) and the commandline. Works well enough for my purposes.
Well, emacs is not just another text editor, it's a whole operating system. The ability to port your emacs skills to other uses, such as reading emails, IRCing, and organizing means emacs is a powerful force multiplier.
You don't have to learn emacs for hours each day. You could do ten minute learning each day tops. Scrap together a few editing shortcut there and there, learning a new feature of emacs, add a new a program, and practicing your editing your skills.
All of these will eventually add up. By the time you're an old fart(Says 50 years old), you could laugh at children with the new fanged badly reinvented versions of emacs and their slow-ass editing workflow.
However, I am just 19 years old who get a little bit of thrill every time he spend a fraction of time each day learning emacs and optimizing his workflow. I got ways before I accumulated several unusual but extremely efficient habits.(Batch web browsing anyone?)
Clojure tool support is pretty rough, even when your main editor is Emacs. Not infrequently I have issues with swank/slime whereby I cannot load libraries correctly, maintain a proper connection or correctly eval a buffer (possibly related to the first issue mentioned). I hope that after 1.2 the community will stop changing the language, fix their infrastructure and let a set of libraries stabilize. Right now, half of the really nifty libraries are on 1.2, the other half on 1.1.
