Comment by Olreich
1 year ago
One group sees the other as a person backpacking with a bespoke gadget for every little thing, wearing a 60lb rucksack while they are wearing a 20lb ultralight pack and have a multi-tool that serves 90% of their needs.
One group sees the other as a person with a reel-mower proclaiming they don’t need a tractor mower, while they can mow much less grass a day.
Both groups are right, and both are wrong. Depending on what you’re doing, it can make sense to use heavyweight tools, lightweight tools, little tooling, or lots of tooling. If you’re hired into a big codebase written over the course of ten years, skipping tools that will help you make sense off it is probably not the right choice. If you’re building a system from scratch, then those same tools might inoculate you to the dangers of having a poorly organized codebase. If you need to debug a server remotely, bring productive in vim and basic command line tools could be invaluable. But if your debugging stuff, you could have saved yourself hours by turning on a debug port and stepping through the code in a debugger.
The arguments everyone is having look to be about whether it’s worth it to learn how to use tools. The answer is yes, but everyone has their identity caught up in their pet workflows.
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