And they'd be right to, because actually the situation is inverted. Saying a useful tool is unnecessary and a symptom of the fact that all tools are broken is the sort of thing the person holding the chainsaw would say, not the people who understand why a whole range of tools exist.
Just because a tool can be misused is not an argument against it nor its inclusion.
I used to believe this, but now I couldn't disagree more. People can and do misuse things all the bloody time, and the more you enable them to do that, the worse your tool is. How people use what you make is every bit as important, possibly even more important than the technical merits of what you make.
I'd rather a builder use a second hand hammer to nail something than try doing it with a jackhammer.
As the saying goes, it is a poor craftworker who blames their tools... but the popular understanding in our community that it means a craftworker should be able to do anything with crappy tools is wrong. The real meaning is that it's a poor craftworker who has crappy tools, but just keeps using them. They should either fix them or get better tools. It is a poor craftworker who blames their tools because it is a poor craftworker who continually uses blameworthy tools!
(Or, in other words, I 100% disagree with the original post. Tools do matter, and it is folly to think otherwise in the face of overwhelming evidence.)
Since our tools are Turing complete, we are in the unusual position of sometimes being able to use our crappy tools to carve out better tools within the tools themselves, but in general, you should be using the best tools you can. And, yes, it is completely fair to judge a tool as being either bad for a job, or just a bad tool in general. Craftworkers who refuse to make such judgments are not exhibiting wisdom, but lack of discernment.
That is not to say that you must always use the best tool to the exclusion of all else. Much as we may not like to hear it, we aren't really craftworkers here for the most part, we are engineers. If I got moved to a big PHP 3.0 project, I would not make it my first order of business to insist that we drop everything and rewrite it in $BETTER_TOOL. That's not a good engineering move. The quality of our tools is only one part of a very complicated melange of relevant issues. But we're still allowed to have judgments, and the fact that tool quality is not 100% exclusively determinative doesn't mean the only other alternative is that they must be 0.0000...% relevant.
This argument makes no sense. You're conflating people and behavior with tools. Bad tools make it easier to do a bad job in any field of work. Novices with good tools will still do a bad job. This is a weak justification for promoting bad tools.
I feel like this falls into the bucket of “if people using a tool always end up doing bad practice X or running into problem Y, maybe they’re not holding it wrong, maybe the tool has issues”.
One has nothing to do with the other. There's no rule about all broken tools because they can be broken in different ways. What's so difficult about my hypothetical? I laid it all out for you.
> If a tool is misused, it's generally because it's hard to use correctly.
Citation needed.
Tools get misused all the time. If I use a flat bladed screw driver as a pry bar/chisel/whatever, that doesn't mean the flat bladed screw driver is hard to use.
But again, that's the wrong tool for the job so of course it's not going to be well suited. When it's that obvious of a wrong tool saying it's terrible is still kind of silly. It's like saying hammers are terrible at screwing things or cars make terrible trampolines.
>Wherever tools are used there are tools made of shit.
I find it's super easy to shit on tools. That doesn't mean another tool is better / will have a better outcome. Most of the tool talk is very focused on a few problems that I am not so sure actually point to the outcome of using it.
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