Some people are into creating things, and other people are into tools. As the saying goes, it's a poor craftsperson that blames their tools. But I also think it's a poor craftsperson who tries to improve by improving their tools.
I see it a lot with photography. Some talented photographers pull incredible images out of older digital cameras and lenses, and don't bother to get new cameras/lenses because the reality is that a new camera wouldn't make their images much better.
Other photographers lack that kind of creative skill but still spend their time buying better and better gear, talking about gear online, and taking pictures of test charts—all without improving their skill.
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.
Many craftsmen do not get the tools they could wish for.
Your craft is your personal responsibility; you use your tools, they don't use you. So, your product is the result of what you do, not what your tools do. Limitations of your tools leave you with greater responsibility to ensure results that satisfy whatever standard you work to.
Blaming your tools for bad results tells people much more about you than about the tools.
It makes sense. Craftspeople make their own tools. The better the tools a craftsperson can make the better the craft. And in design, the more skilled the designer the better tools they will design because designing tools is ‘just’ design.
At the edges there are not enough people for off the shelf solutions. And doing it yourself is more productive than shopping for a silver bullet.
"It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools" does not mean, as so many programmers seem to believe, that tools don't matter at all, only skills do, so if someone failed it can't possibly be their tools, only their skill.
It means that part of being an expert craftsman is having the experience and skills to select excellent tools, and the experience and skills to drive those excellent tools to produce excellent results. Blaming your tools means either that you lack skill, or that you chose your tools poorly because you lack the experience and skills to choose correctly. Sitting there and defending bad tools does not impress me; it makes you sound like a craftsman who can not tell the difference between good tools and bad tools... and that's a bad craftsman.
Yes. Tools matter. Good tools won't bring you to your optimum peak performance on your own, but bad tools will guarantee you'll never get there. Bad tools typically take longer to work with, and typically teach bad habits to get around their deficiencies.
Da Vinci with a mop and a bucket of mud may be a better painter than you, but he would never beat Da Vinci with quality tools.
It is a poor carpenter who blames his tools. Why? Because a skilled carpenter has money to buy the best tools.
Tools matter.
Developer experience matters. Cognitive cost matters when tools are used by non-infinite brains. If you don’t believe that, then build a product with a confusing UI and try selling it.
>while the good craftsman learns to use what they have
No, he goes out and gets new ones or fixes/builds them himself. That's how I always understood the saying; the emphasis is on the word "blame" not the word "tool". It's about people who sit around and complain rather than taking action to fix the problem. It doesn't mean you should put up with shitty tools.
I assume you mean "a poor craftsman blames his tools".
Is there actually any evidence that over-focusing on tools is a common problem? I understand it could be, and we've all probably wasted an hour here and there, but I don't fear drowning in a glass of water just because I've swallowed wrong a few times
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 don't think this is a very good analogy. The craftsmen I know use basic, simple tools that work well. They just handle them masterfully. The more complex tools are often for beginners who need the hand holding.
I see it a lot with photography. Some talented photographers pull incredible images out of older digital cameras and lenses, and don't bother to get new cameras/lenses because the reality is that a new camera wouldn't make their images much better.
Other photographers lack that kind of creative skill but still spend their time buying better and better gear, talking about gear online, and taking pictures of test charts—all without improving their skill.
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