I hold VSCode to be at least equal to those achievements. Having used dozens of text editors and IDEs in the course of my programming career, I can appreciate how non-obvious it is for a piece of software this complex to work so fucking well all the time.
And considering how many people are empowered by the productivity gains VSCode brings, I'd say that the real-world impact of VSCode is also much greater than that of most of the projects you listed. VSCode has probably saved hundreds of millions of hours for programmers over the past few years. It's almost impossible to come up with an appropriate comparison for how important it is.
You are saying an IDE (of which there are many wayyy better) is as equally important as a technology which helped save thousands of lives? Do you really think VSCode is an equally big achievement as building space stations?
peoples lives are more important than a few hours of a programmers life getting used to vim (or any other non VSCode editor)
EDIT: Even millions, and thats only one of thousand technologies that improve our life (expectancy)
It baffles me how many people seem to have no idea how important software is.
Software runs the world. It runs your healthcare. It runs medical research. It runs space exploration. It runs every science megaproject. None of the engineering feats mentioned above would have been remotely possible without modern software.
And modern software is built with tools like VSCode. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that VSCode was and is involved in the development and maintenance of every single project listed above.
Software controls lives. Software saves lives. Software is every single bit as important as medicine. If all software suddenly stopped working, civilization would collapse and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people would die.
That's too obvious of a troll, please, stop here for a second, take a deep breath and reconsider. It's okay, you can let go of your past mistake, nobody will blame you.
How complex is VSCode anyway compared to the older days of Eclipse IDE compiling and building apps for Blackberry and Android. If VSCode was released circa 2010 it can't even compile a small J2ME application.
And considering how many people are empowered by the productivity gains VSCode brings, I'd say that the real-world impact of VSCode is also much greater than that of most of the projects you listed. VSCode has probably saved hundreds of millions of hours for programmers over the past few years. It's almost impossible to come up with an appropriate comparison for how important it is.