7 ms·

I've noticed the people who work to master the tools of their trade are also the people who master the trade itself. I've yet to meet someone who mastered the

by 0xEFF 8y ago

I've noticed the people who work to master the tools of their trade are also the people who master the trade itself. I've yet to meet someone who mastered the trade without also mastering the tools they use.

arcturus17 8y ago
Semes to me that the mastery of a text editor doesn’t have an impact on your end product in the same way that the mastery of the chisel does for a woodworker...
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  Thats because you can’t press “u” on a chisel. It’s a single mode auto-saving tool. I’ve got a job at home that needs a chisel and I’m quite weary about doing it, knowing if I screw it up it’s a problem. git checkout — . won’t save me.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  I draw almost precisely the opposite conclusion. Having used both vim and chisels, with varying degrees of mastery.
xaduha 8y ago
Ain't nobody got time for that. Pareto principle, my friend. I'm here to get the job done.
- blunte 8y ago
  Your 20% may not be everyone else's 20%.
zwkrt 8y ago
Agreed completely. There are few great songwriters who can't play an instrument, few great mathematicians who don't know arithmetic, few great golfers that don't understand how to hold their clubs, etc.
- michaelgrafl 8y ago
  We're not talking about the basics. We're talking about mastery. Many great musicians haven't mastered their instruments because many styles of music don't ask for it. So that analogy is arguing against your own point. Great a great golfer is more or less synonymous with being good at golf. A better analogy to text editing and programming would be a golf player being obsessed with caddies.
- joesb 8y ago
  Moving cursor using arrow key vs using hjkl is no way comparable to not knowing arithmetic. That's like some fanboy comparison.
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    I'm not worried about using the arrow keys or anything in particular. I don't even think vim is an especially good program. But whatever tool you use you should be effective with it. All the comments insecure about vim practices are missing the point; using your tools effectively is worth it and is a highly transferrable skill. If your weapon of choice is a magnetic needle and a steady hand, I expect you to be able to write code in cursive forward and bakcward all over that disk like there was no tomorrow.
raverbashing 8y ago
This is one of those things that looks like it make sense but it ends up being shallow wishful thinking. Learning every nook and cranny of your editor is just a waste of time. As an old advertisement said "It's a tool, not an art form. Why are you wasting your time learning it" Tools should get out of the way. I like Vim but I'm not going out of my way to do something that I could do more easily in another editor or with another tool (or just do manually). Your code is not going to be 10x better because you know some extra Vim or Emacs magic. Even those powerful "do all" Java IDEs, while very helpful, don't write the code for you. There's no magic, miracle or hidden power there. It makes some things extremely easy but it won't write the code for you Learn it if you like but don't expect any epiphany coming from it.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  The problem is you can't do those things more easily. The GUI has tricked you. But think about it this way. Leaning your editor in full and taking advantage of what it offers -- no matter what editor your chose is ensuring that tool gets out of your way. There are a lot of tedious things when editing and writing code. And by using your editor to aid, you get a lot of advantages. 1) you can do it in less time. 2) the chances of making a mistake on something repetitive goes down when you use your tool to aid you. 3) Using the editors advanced features can often make boring task fun. I also think you are slightly wrong. While not 10x better code. I expect the code coming from somebody who uses their editor in full will produce better looking more consistent code. EDIT: removing snark.
  - xrisk 8y ago
    There are many things that a good IDE can do automatically which would require a lot of configuration for Vim. Sure, you might be willing to spend that kind of time configuring your editor, but most people just want to do their job and get on. It's the same reason most people don't use Arch Linux or Gentoo even though they might be arguably superior–not everybody wants to spend their spare time editing config files.
  - michaelgrafl 8y ago
    You seem to think GUI tools are somehow inferior to text based tools. I wonder how many people would still vouch for Vim if they spent as much time learning a modern editor as Vim. But frankly, I don't think it's possible to spend as much time configuring any other editor as much as Vim, since most editors can do out of the box what hundreds of lines of .vimrc can't accomplish.
jchw 8y ago
Text editors, though, are really only one tool. There's plenty of different "tools" and other things to have a mastery understanding of, and I've never seen any proof that you need to be a vim golf pro to write amazing code. If that was the case, clearly our interviews should be all about text editing ;) In all seriousness, I personally see marginal at best benefit to getting better at text editors. I do occasionally learn things that improve my workflow, but I prefer to spend time on other things, there's enough subjects I'll already never know as much as I'd wish about...
chronogram 8y ago
I have not noticed the same thing. I think it's not black or white. People who use certain tools a lot often become quite familiar with them, so maybe you've noticed that? But it's not like when VS Code released, all the vimzards who went to use it suddenly became awful at their job.
ifiri90pokn 8y ago
A dozen+ years ago I might have disagreed. Anymore, the day to day the trade is pretty much “edit text.” Edit dependency lists and maybe implement some new code to handle passing the data between deps. Or install a dependency to do it. Unless you’re working at an IBM or Google on some new cutting edge thing (and even then a whole lot of this was figured out in math decades before and just needed computers hardware to catch up), this is how it goes in most office jobs. I’m not the type to romanticize the reality. If you’re mostly thinking about your problem, you’re overthinking the solution. And if you think I’m nuts, look at YouTube. Tons of videos where people are hacking together games and websites with quite a bit of features in hours. This isn’t 1999, Neo. There is no magic.
kryptiskt 8y ago
I know several great programmers who use Notepad. I'm pretty decent at what I do and I use whatever is handy (from vim to IntelliJ) and I can't say I have mastered any of them. And I just don't care, maximum speed is of little interest to me, quality is the important thing and the editor has little to do with that.
- userbinator 8y ago
  I know several great programmers who use Notepad. ...and now you know another one ;-) A lot of others are very surprised when they see me work without using any IDE, just multiple text editors and terminal windows. I don't need syntax highlighting or any other fanciness like autoformatting; in fact I find them distracting. I use Notepad on Windows and Vim elsewhere, and on the latter have Visual Studio only for its debugger (but will sometimes use WinDbg instead.) I believe much of why I do this is because I started without any IDE, sometimes even writing lots of code by hand on paper and thinking about it before entering it into the computer. When IDEs became available, I didn't see much point in changing my workflow. Contrast this with some coworkers who have such a plugin-ful IDE and are so accustomed to using it that they'd rather wait upwards of half a minute to open a source code file than browse to the file in the filesystem and open it with a text editor. These same coworkers also complain about why their machines are so slow... I wonder if those others you know also started the "old school" way.
  - michaelgrafl 8y ago
    Whenever I use Notepad for quick edits it trips me up with its lack of Unicode support and inability to handle Unix-style line endings. I've tried to write (i.e. read) code without syntax highlighting for giggles, too. But I felt like it really slowed me down (i.e. cost me more energy to focus). You know there is a middle ground between Notepad and Visual Studio, in various places on the spectrum, right?
    - tdeck 8y ago
      Notepad also has an undo "queue" only one level deep. When I last used it I found that very frustrating, particularly in a non-modal editor where it's not clear what counts as a single change.
Insanity 8y ago
I agree partly. People who master the tools seem to always enjoy and master the trade. But, there are people who enjoy and master the trade without mastering the tools as well :)
atoav 8y ago
I must say I disagree. Having some control over the tools is certainly of benefit. Yet my experience certainly was, that the greatest people I met were sometimes surprisingly slow with the tools they used. This is because what really seems to matter is their prespective at things and what decisions they take then. Sure knowing their tools inside out will make them faster, but it is not the KEY thing of why you would take them over every other person. Unless of course your job very focused on these tools (e.g. hand crafting etc) and even there knowledge often trumps tools. Tools are just tools. If you look at a Cameraperson at a movie set, you will see it even more so. A young guy who knows that 50k€ Arri Alexa inside out might be ending up making worse images than that old fart who just knows where to put it and how to press record. That young guy would be a perfect camera assistant tho. Making pictures is not the camera, just like writing code is not the editor. If I manage to get to the same thing as you, it doesn't matter if I use notepad.exe, a typewriter or pen and paper, unless it takes me ten times as long. But nearly none of the time consuming problems I had with code were ever due to the fact that my editor slowed me down, but rather that I wasn't aware of parts of my code. I aknowledge however that people are different, and maybe it could be distracting if your editor is to slow depending on the type of person you are. I also like smooth workflows where things don't get in my way also in vim, but there is a threshold above which it bascially won't matter anymore.
- thatoneuser 8y ago
  Skill of your too directly impacts your ability to complete a task. If you struggle to prep food for cooking, you're going to be slower and probably less effective than the master chef who doesn't even have to think about how to dice. But I'll agree with you in this way - there are a lot of people who want to just get good at their tools (huge vimrc that's mostly unused) and don't care about how well they actually write code. I think it stems from procrastinating.
  - schwurb 8y ago
    > If you struggle to prep food for cooking, you're going to be slower and probably less effective than the master chef who doesn't even have to think about how to dice. This analogy is not good in that prepping is a major part of the complete task. To fix the analogy, consider the same scenario, but prepping now takes only 2 minutes per complete meal and can be cut down to 30 seconds given years of training.
StreamBright 8y ago
Sure but there are so many tools that you have to be selective about what you are mastering. Also, great tools are easier to be mastered.
z3t4 8y ago
My observation is that masters prefer simple tools.
michaelgrafl 8y ago
I've seen (very) competent programmers at varying degrees of tool mastery. If we're talking text editing tools at least. I don't consider text editing speed that important to my programming productivity. I like things that help me comprehend code, like syntax highlighting and being able to easily jump to definitions or a tool tip telling me what arguments a function needs. This is not directed at you particularly, but when I see people say they are faster at navigating the cursor with hjkl than the arrow keys, I can't help but roll my eyes. I'm pretty comfortable with navigating text in Vim. It's great how little strain it puts on your arms to not have to reach for your mouse. But overall the mouse is such a superior pointing device, and I have to use it for tons of other stuff anyway, that I feel like I'm putting a lot less overall strain on myself by using a "normal" modern non-modal editor. I've used Vim for years. But after forcing myself to learn to use the mouse for text editing tasks, I'm actually in the Zone a lot more often. I almost feel like a 10x-er in comparison to my Vim years.
wolco 8y ago
Those who master language and domain live outside of tools and don't need them but use them for speed.

by 0xEFF 8y ago

arcturus17 8y ago

Semes to me that the mastery of a text editor doesn’t have an impact on your end product in the same way that the mastery of the chisel does for a woodworker...

quickthrower2 8y ago
Thats because you can’t press “u” on a chisel. It’s a single mode auto-saving tool. I’ve got a job at home that needs a chisel and I’m quite weary about doing it, knowing if I screw it up it’s a problem. git checkout — . won’t save me.
dredmorbius 8y ago
I draw almost precisely the opposite conclusion. Having used both vim and chisels, with varying degrees of mastery.

xaduha 8y ago

Ain't nobody got time for that. Pareto principle, my friend. I'm here to get the job done.

blunte 8y ago
Your 20% may not be everyone else's 20%.

zwkrt 8y ago

Agreed completely. There are few great songwriters who can't play an instrument, few great mathematicians who don't know arithmetic, few great golfers that don't understand how to hold their clubs, etc.

michaelgrafl 8y ago
We're not talking about the basics. We're talking about mastery. Many great musicians haven't mastered their instruments because many styles of music don't ask for it. So that analogy is arguing against your own point. Great a great golfer is more or less synonymous with being good at golf. A better analogy to text editing and programming would be a golf player being obsessed with caddies.
joesb 8y ago
Moving cursor using arrow key vs using hjkl is no way comparable to not knowing arithmetic. That's like some fanboy comparison.
- zwkrt 8y ago
  I'm not worried about using the arrow keys or anything in particular. I don't even think vim is an especially good program. But whatever tool you use you should be effective with it. All the comments insecure about vim practices are missing the point; using your tools effectively is worth it and is a highly transferrable skill. If your weapon of choice is a magnetic needle and a steady hand, I expect you to be able to write code in cursive forward and bakcward all over that disk like there was no tomorrow.

raverbashing 8y ago

This is one of those things that looks like it make sense but it ends up being shallow wishful thinking. Learning every nook and cranny of your editor is just a waste of time. As an old advertisement said "It's a tool, not an art form. Why are you wasting your time learning it" Tools should get out of the way. I like Vim but I'm not going out of my way to do something that I could do more easily in another editor or with another tool (or just do manually). Your code is not going to be 10x better because you know some extra Vim or Emacs magic. Even those powerful "do all" Java IDEs, while very helpful, don't write the code for you. There's no magic, miracle or hidden power there. It makes some things extremely easy but it won't write the code for you Learn it if you like but don't expect any epiphany coming from it.

mbrumlow 8y ago
The problem is you can't do those things more easily. The GUI has tricked you. But think about it this way. Leaning your editor in full and taking advantage of what it offers -- no matter what editor your chose is ensuring that tool gets out of your way. There are a lot of tedious things when editing and writing code. And by using your editor to aid, you get a lot of advantages. 1) you can do it in less time. 2) the chances of making a mistake on something repetitive goes down when you use your tool to aid you. 3) Using the editors advanced features can often make boring task fun. I also think you are slightly wrong. While not 10x better code. I expect the code coming from somebody who uses their editor in full will produce better looking more consistent code. EDIT: removing snark.
- xrisk 8y ago
  There are many things that a good IDE can do automatically which would require a lot of configuration for Vim. Sure, you might be willing to spend that kind of time configuring your editor, but most people just want to do their job and get on. It's the same reason most people don't use Arch Linux or Gentoo even though they might be arguably superior–not everybody wants to spend their spare time editing config files.
- michaelgrafl 8y ago
  You seem to think GUI tools are somehow inferior to text based tools. I wonder how many people would still vouch for Vim if they spent as much time learning a modern editor as Vim. But frankly, I don't think it's possible to spend as much time configuring any other editor as much as Vim, since most editors can do out of the box what hundreds of lines of .vimrc can't accomplish.

jchw 8y ago

Text editors, though, are really only one tool. There's plenty of different "tools" and other things to have a mastery understanding of, and I've never seen any proof that you need to be a vim golf pro to write amazing code. If that was the case, clearly our interviews should be all about text editing ;) In all seriousness, I personally see marginal at best benefit to getting better at text editors. I do occasionally learn things that improve my workflow, but I prefer to spend time on other things, there's enough subjects I'll already never know as much as I'd wish about...

chronogram 8y ago

I have not noticed the same thing. I think it's not black or white. People who use certain tools a lot often become quite familiar with them, so maybe you've noticed that? But it's not like when VS Code released, all the vimzards who went to use it suddenly became awful at their job.

ifiri90pokn 8y ago

A dozen+ years ago I might have disagreed. Anymore, the day to day the trade is pretty much “edit text.” Edit dependency lists and maybe implement some new code to handle passing the data between deps. Or install a dependency to do it. Unless you’re working at an IBM or Google on some new cutting edge thing (and even then a whole lot of this was figured out in math decades before and just needed computers hardware to catch up), this is how it goes in most office jobs. I’m not the type to romanticize the reality. If you’re mostly thinking about your problem, you’re overthinking the solution. And if you think I’m nuts, look at YouTube. Tons of videos where people are hacking together games and websites with quite a bit of features in hours. This isn’t 1999, Neo. There is no magic.

kryptiskt 8y ago

I know several great programmers who use Notepad. I'm pretty decent at what I do and I use whatever is handy (from vim to IntelliJ) and I can't say I have mastered any of them. And I just don't care, maximum speed is of little interest to me, quality is the important thing and the editor has little to do with that.

userbinator 8y ago
I know several great programmers who use Notepad. ...and now you know another one ;-) A lot of others are very surprised when they see me work without using any IDE, just multiple text editors and terminal windows. I don't need syntax highlighting or any other fanciness like autoformatting; in fact I find them distracting. I use Notepad on Windows and Vim elsewhere, and on the latter have Visual Studio only for its debugger (but will sometimes use WinDbg instead.) I believe much of why I do this is because I started without any IDE, sometimes even writing lots of code by hand on paper and thinking about it before entering it into the computer. When IDEs became available, I didn't see much point in changing my workflow. Contrast this with some coworkers who have such a plugin-ful IDE and are so accustomed to using it that they'd rather wait upwards of half a minute to open a source code file than browse to the file in the filesystem and open it with a text editor. These same coworkers also complain about why their machines are so slow... I wonder if those others you know also started the "old school" way.
- michaelgrafl 8y ago
  Whenever I use Notepad for quick edits it trips me up with its lack of Unicode support and inability to handle Unix-style line endings. I've tried to write (i.e. read) code without syntax highlighting for giggles, too. But I felt like it really slowed me down (i.e. cost me more energy to focus). You know there is a middle ground between Notepad and Visual Studio, in various places on the spectrum, right?
  - tdeck 8y ago
    Notepad also has an undo "queue" only one level deep. When I last used it I found that very frustrating, particularly in a non-modal editor where it's not clear what counts as a single change.

Insanity 8y ago

I agree partly. People who master the tools seem to always enjoy and master the trade. But, there are people who enjoy and master the trade without mastering the tools as well :)

atoav 8y ago

I must say I disagree. Having some control over the tools is certainly of benefit. Yet my experience certainly was, that the greatest people I met were sometimes surprisingly slow with the tools they used. This is because what really seems to matter is their prespective at things and what decisions they take then. Sure knowing their tools inside out will make them faster, but it is not the KEY thing of why you would take them over every other person. Unless of course your job very focused on these tools (e.g. hand crafting etc) and even there knowledge often trumps tools. Tools are just tools. If you look at a Cameraperson at a movie set, you will see it even more so. A young guy who knows that 50k€ Arri Alexa inside out might be ending up making worse images than that old fart who just knows where to put it and how to press record. That young guy would be a perfect camera assistant tho. Making pictures is not the camera, just like writing code is not the editor. If I manage to get to the same thing as you, it doesn't matter if I use notepad.exe, a typewriter or pen and paper, unless it takes me ten times as long. But nearly none of the time consuming problems I had with code were ever due to the fact that my editor slowed me down, but rather that I wasn't aware of parts of my code. I aknowledge however that people are different, and maybe it could be distracting if your editor is to slow depending on the type of person you are. I also like smooth workflows where things don't get in my way also in vim, but there is a threshold above which it bascially won't matter anymore.

thatoneuser 8y ago
Skill of your too directly impacts your ability to complete a task. If you struggle to prep food for cooking, you're going to be slower and probably less effective than the master chef who doesn't even have to think about how to dice. But I'll agree with you in this way - there are a lot of people who want to just get good at their tools (huge vimrc that's mostly unused) and don't care about how well they actually write code. I think it stems from procrastinating.
- schwurb 8y ago
  > If you struggle to prep food for cooking, you're going to be slower and probably less effective than the master chef who doesn't even have to think about how to dice. This analogy is not good in that prepping is a major part of the complete task. To fix the analogy, consider the same scenario, but prepping now takes only 2 minutes per complete meal and can be cut down to 30 seconds given years of training.

StreamBright 8y ago

Sure but there are so many tools that you have to be selective about what you are mastering. Also, great tools are easier to be mastered.

z3t4 8y ago

My observation is that masters prefer simple tools.

michaelgrafl 8y ago

I've seen (very) competent programmers at varying degrees of tool mastery. If we're talking text editing tools at least. I don't consider text editing speed that important to my programming productivity. I like things that help me comprehend code, like syntax highlighting and being able to easily jump to definitions or a tool tip telling me what arguments a function needs. This is not directed at you particularly, but when I see people say they are faster at navigating the cursor with hjkl than the arrow keys, I can't help but roll my eyes. I'm pretty comfortable with navigating text in Vim. It's great how little strain it puts on your arms to not have to reach for your mouse. But overall the mouse is such a superior pointing device, and I have to use it for tons of other stuff anyway, that I feel like I'm putting a lot less overall strain on myself by using a "normal" modern non-modal editor. I've used Vim for years. But after forcing myself to learn to use the mouse for text editing tasks, I'm actually in the Zone a lot more often. I almost feel like a 10x-er in comparison to my Vim years.

wolco 8y ago

Those who master language and domain live outside of tools and don't need them but use them for speed.