Comment by aaplok

13 hours ago

I like baking. There are machines that can bake bread at an industrial scale that I cannot compete with. There are home kneaders that do much of the work very well. I use one of those more often than not.

I still think it worth my time kneading dough by hand. It teaches me the various properties of flour, how external factors like humidity or temperature impact the overall process, and I believe that it makes me a better baker, even when I use a machine, because I am better at controlling what the machine does. When I get a new brand of flour I will make sure to bake everything by hand first to "get a feel".

Kneading by hand is also very relaxing to me. This is probably the main reason I bake in the first place.

Programming, and other activities are not very different. We now have machines that can do it faster, at a fraction of the quality many people deem good enough. If you hate coding, that is probably all you need to use, and learning a new language might just be a frustrating experience not worth subjecting yourself to. But if you enjoy coding then it should make you better at it, even when you use the machines.