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.
> 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.
And a good carpenter understands that tools can be better or worse, and that a good carpenter who uses bad tools will be worse off than a good carpenter who uses good tools. It's not wrong of anyone (regardless of skill level) to demand better tools; power is not a blanket excuse for poor design. You can have powerful tools with non-dangerous defaults.
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.
Your company has hammers and screw drivers as your tools. If your employees only know how to use hammers, they are going to hammer screws. If your team only knows how to use screw drivers, they will shrug at nails. Hence, the tool is not always at fault for end user error.
Learning how and when it is appropriate to use the tools at hand is important.
Certainly people should use the tools they like and are comfortable with. That said, I would suggest that there's a limit to this "whatever you like is fine" logic.
If you were building a birdhouse and decided you liked hammering in nails with the broad side of a wrench, yeah, ok, I guess that's your business and ultimately you can hammer those nails how you want. But if you saw a professional carpenter hammering in nails with a wrench, you'd have to seriously question whether you hired the right carpenter.
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.
FTFY: "I don't understand why those who spend most of their time __using tools__ focus so much on the tools they use to do it."
It should be more self-evident now.
When there are many tools which meet the minimum requirements for doing a job, then the focus becomes not on which tool can do the job, but which tool you feel does the job the best (or you enjoy using). Carpenters argue about the best saws/drills, artists argue about the best brushes/paints, musicians argue about the best instrument maker.
You're right, customers don't care about what tool was used to build something, but they care that you can do your job well and good tools help you do that.
That's a pretty poor analogy. Nails are often the right and often the wrong tool for different circumstances. And there are different kinds of nails. Lots of carpenters have preferences for what types of hardware they use - based on their own experience and that of experience from others. And even if I disagreed with a carpenter on what tools were right for any given particular circumstance, it would be silly to try to micromanage them doing their job - just let them do their work!
Just because it's one tool of many does not mean it's good. The whole tool thing is a bit of a non sequitur. After all Basic and Intercal are also just "a tool among others in the toolbox". This doesn't mean they are good tools!
I really do not understand why this tool argument comes up. Do you never evaluate the quality of your tools? I was planning to come up with a good analogy to some carpenter's tool that is objectively bad and not used any more, but then it turns out I know effectively nothing about carpentry.
No one said people weren't allowed to build something with Svelte or whatever, just that they didn't think it was a good way to explore it, and backed that up with reasoning. Additionally, if there were other reasons for doing it, those would be interesting to hear.
I wouldn't get too worked up about this: discussions about which jobs a tool lends itself well to can be very insightful.
I hate using a screw driver with nails and I hate using a hammer with screws. It seems to me that with any tool there is a specific problem or set of problems it is intended to solve. There is also a (likely) larger set of problems that are very difficult to solve using the tool. Why are we blaming the tools for their users' mistakes. If a carpenter uses tools insufficiently suited for his project, do we blame the tools or the carpenter?
Exactly, tool vs hammer. Sometimes you made the wrong choice in tool, and then you switch tools.. Nothing wrong with that. A craftman just knows its tools better. There is no magic bullet here.
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.
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