This. Let me state my assumption and philosophy first. I believe strongly in learning and investing in the fundamentals — things that stay more or less the same

This. Let me state my assumption and philosophy first. I believe strongly in learning and investing in the fundamentals — things that stay more or less the same for a long time. There will be another new and _modern_ IDE tomorrow. Why invest and learn something that keeps changing? It’s like spending most of your time learning React or Angular, while you could have spent the same time learning JavaScript itself. I am not saying tools are not useful. IDEs, high level frameworks absolutely boost productivity. If your goal is to get something done fast, sure use these tools. But if you want to make long term investments, you should learn the fundamentals and later potentially use these frameworks (when you understand how they work) to further boost your productivity. But people often get used to the tools they use, so people with a learning mindset, who start with the fundamental tools tend to stick with them. That’s why I think a correlation exists between engineers who have a good deep understanding of how a system works and engineers who use basic tools.