Hi all. I'm a long time lurker, but when I saw my article made the front page, I made an account. :) I don't think that using tools makes us "bad"... I think p

Hi all. I'm a long time lurker, but when I saw my article made the front page, I made an account. :) I don't think that using tools makes us "bad"... I think pretending that we're "good" when we really need the tools make it much more difficult for us to past our egos and really look for what we need. There are so many great practices and tools available, but most developers I've encountered because things are "good enough". I was hoping to encourage people to try something new. Something a "good" programmer would never need, but a "bad" programmer would desperately want. In regards to knowing the API versus using an IDE... spend some time with a Ruby developer. Someone who's not used to having great IDE support. They've been forced to learn the language. The difference in their productivity level is amazing. Contrast them with a developer who only learned Java or dot Net and was using Eclipse or Visual Studio from day one. Those developers tend to not learn the underlying APIs and I think it hurts their ability to know what functionality and libraries are available to them. Anyway, it's very cool seeing an article I wrote on HN!