How is this ridiculous? I don't think the core of what he is saying (that tools affect how you think) is a matter of opinion. I can certainly see how people wou

How is this ridiculous? I don't think the core of what he is saying (that tools affect how you think) is a matter of opinion. I can certainly see how people would disagree on his conclusion (therefore everyone must use the harder tools). Tools that force you to hold a model of what's going on in your head and reason about its state require you to think completely differently than tools which hold the state or context for you outside of your head. Think about how different it feels to compose a message in your head, or with a pencil and paper, compared to using a word processor. You can even notice this effect by just typing text with your eyes closed as compared to staring at the screen as you type. The amount of context in your head affects how you think about things. At least for me, the tools I use greatly affect how much context I absorb into my head, and as a result what kind of theory generation and problem solving I can do, especially when a problem is hard enough that it requires several sessions of debugging.