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Languages are tools. Da Vinci with a mop and a bucket of mud would be a better painter than me. In fact I recently saw a video where Kelly Slater surfed a door

by uuilly 16y ago

Languages are tools. Da Vinci with a mop and a bucket of mud would be a better painter than me. In fact I recently saw a video where Kelly Slater surfed a door and a coffee table as impressively as most weekend warriors surf on $700 custom shaped boards. Focus on your skill not the tools. Surfing is more about timing, fitness and knowledge of waves than it is about the board. Likewise coding is more about RAM, CPUs, HDs, GPUs, busses, networks and ultimately users than it is about what tools you use to manipulate them.

jshen 16y ago
"Likewise coding is more about RAM, CPUs, HDs, GPUs, busses, networks and ultimately users than it is about what tools you use to manipulate them." My coding is primarily about managing complexity through good abstractions, and sometimes doing optimizations. Different languages are better suited to good abstractions. Kelly Slater might use a coffee table for fun one time, but he won't use one for his next competition.
MichaelGG 16y ago
You're right that people should be worried about their skills. But tools are a critical part of actually programming. It's like saying "famous author X used pen and paper, hence complaining that Word 2010 doesn't handle Y properly is silly - focus on your writing!" (Worse even, as for pure writing, the speedup between pen/typewriter/Word is probably less pronounced than between programming languages.)
CWuestefeld 16y ago
a video where Kelly Slater surfed a door and a coffee table as impressively as most weekend warriors surf on $700 custom shaped boards. I saw a table tennis player all excited about his new carbon fiber paddle. Then one of the club champs picked up the box the new paddle had come in and, using the box as a paddle, proceeded to defeat the player with the carbon paddle.
- deleted 16y ago
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- calloc 16y ago
  I had a professor in University that beat some kid who thought he was all that at Table Tennis with a shoe, a baseball bat, a piece of cardboard, an empty plastic bottle, and then his bare hands. It was absolutely hilarious how pissed this guy was getting with his fancy paddle and his attempts at tricking my professor with trick shots.
jerf 16y ago
"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.
andos 16y ago
> Da Vinci with a mop and a bucket of mud would be a better painter than me. Maybe. But Da Vinci would never paint the Mona Lisa with a mop and a bucket of mud. If he did, it wouldn't have survived to modern times. Am I stretching the analogy too much? Paint Mona Lisas, people. With amazing skill and great tools.

by uuilly 16y ago

jshen 16y ago

"Likewise coding is more about RAM, CPUs, HDs, GPUs, busses, networks and ultimately users than it is about what tools you use to manipulate them." My coding is primarily about managing complexity through good abstractions, and sometimes doing optimizations. Different languages are better suited to good abstractions. Kelly Slater might use a coffee table for fun one time, but he won't use one for his next competition.

MichaelGG 16y ago

You're right that people should be worried about their skills. But tools are a critical part of actually programming. It's like saying "famous author X used pen and paper, hence complaining that Word 2010 doesn't handle Y properly is silly - focus on your writing!" (Worse even, as for pure writing, the speedup between pen/typewriter/Word is probably less pronounced than between programming languages.)

CWuestefeld 16y ago

a video where Kelly Slater surfed a door and a coffee table as impressively as most weekend warriors surf on $700 custom shaped boards. I saw a table tennis player all excited about his new carbon fiber paddle. Then one of the club champs picked up the box the new paddle had come in and, using the box as a paddle, proceeded to defeat the player with the carbon paddle.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
calloc 16y ago
I had a professor in University that beat some kid who thought he was all that at Table Tennis with a shoe, a baseball bat, a piece of cardboard, an empty plastic bottle, and then his bare hands. It was absolutely hilarious how pissed this guy was getting with his fancy paddle and his attempts at tricking my professor with trick shots.

jerf 16y ago

"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.

andos 16y ago

> Da Vinci with a mop and a bucket of mud would be a better painter than me. Maybe. But Da Vinci would never paint the Mona Lisa with a mop and a bucket of mud. If he did, it wouldn't have survived to modern times. Am I stretching the analogy too much? Paint Mona Lisas, people. With amazing skill and great tools.