As a try-hard wanna be-learning-programmer. ST leaves me very satisfied and very thankful for the autocomplete feature (im sure more experienced programmers can see the flaws here though).
I work in XML and SQL in my everyday work activities and its highlighting features are stupid good.
As an amateur coder/noob I'm happy I'm not unique in this idea. I constantly start projects in Flask/Python and just try to make them as complex as possible (to the limit of my current capabilities). When I'm at work (im an Incident Manager for a NOC/SOC) I can somewhat hold my own in conversations about infrastructure issues. I'm also hoping to go into the security field soon (OSCP cert).
This, easily one of the greatest writers in the genre but largely ignored in regards to marrying literature and sci fi. I suspect he is too dense for most, although they will never admit it.
I'm learning Javascript. I can safely say im comfortable with most fundemental programming concepts...then the book starts talking about recursive functions.
Suffice to say once I hit that section I went back to codeacademy finished the course (which never brought them up and I'm not sure if that's good or bad) now I'm back in Eloquent Javascript...it get's really hard really fast.