I can't speak for all emacs users, but I wouldn't be caught dead using an "IDE"
IDE ostensibly stands for "integrated development environment." AFAIK, not a single IDE is as integrated, programmable, hackable, flexible, or stable as emacs (or vim).
In Emacs, I can effortlessly open and navigate through an indefinitely large number of files. I can take advantage of myriads of language-specific modes for syntax highlighting, auto-completion, snippets, verification, prettification, truly integrated compiler/interpreter environments, you name it.
If I find I need to do some repetitious gruntwork, I can C-x ( gruntwork C-x ) it away. If this gruntwork seems excessive, I can program it into my editor and forget about it. If I find I really need some feature or functionality, I can pop open a scratch buffer, hack it, and use it instantly. No boilerplate, no compiling, no restarting.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, though. The overwhelming sense an emacs or vim user experiences, is one of power. We have complete control over our programming environment. We dictate it, hack it, and tweak it until it is effortless. This sense of power and hackability so permeates our programming environment, that it becomes physically painful to have to navigate a swarm of inconsistent modal dialogues, accept some kludges and pray they get fixed, and accept that The Developers know how best to configure our environment.
"NOTE: Depending on your query, it may take several minutes to return the results of your query to the worksheet."
First thought: this has got to be a parody.
Second thought: Oh Cthulhu, it is for real.
Third thought: Just by mentioning this link almost anywhere, it'll be excoriated as "just another baseless attack on Microsoft (which I, being a technologically fair and balanced soul, will admit to having less than stellar practices)"
"If you can't make the effort to make your post understandable to someone not in your domain, why should I assume you're saying something worth reading?"
He assumed the domain of people familiar with ginsu knives is roughly identical to the domain of people who have ever watched an infomercial in the past two decades.
Obviously, there are people all over the world for which this assumption is false. However, globalization is arguably incomplete until every single human on earth has at some time thought: "Gee. Cuts through a boot. How tired would I have to be for this advertisement to work?"
This is not quite what you want, but there are quite a few 4D puzzles.
iirc, Scott Kim, who did many of the illustrations for Douglas Hofstadter, wrote a paper presenting an optical illusion only perceivable in 4 spatial dimensions ("The Impossible Skew Quadrilateral: A Four-Dimensional Optical Illusion").
Not a novel, or a single book, but I love Richard Feynman's descriptions of Los Alamos. I can read his accounts of mental arithmetic battles with Bohr, safecracking, the programming of dozens of old-school human computers, all day long.
I long ago discovered that no one really likes small talk. It's the prelude to a real conversation; that's the only reason people engage in it (or to signal to each other's monkey brains that one is not a threat).
The solution? Ramp it up into a real conversation. Talk about economics, politics, religion, and Emacs vs. Vim. Out of the blue, whatever.
On a side note, who do you think the women will remember more: the guy who they got into an conversation with about Frederic Bastiat, or the 100th guy to ask them about the weather?
This, combined with the report about a robot that can forage for biomass (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614006), means we're that much closer to building a race of cybernetic Summer Glau's.
One of my VLSI friends lamented about his Gen Ed requirements:
"They want me to be a "well-rounded" engineer. Well, I know vector calculus, finite algebra, compiler theory, and enough quantum mechanics to know a little about what's going on under the silicon. Is that not well-rounded enough?"
"The wikifiddler drew his wikivorpal sword and slayed the terrible wikibeast"