My father was a wiz with a slide rule and understood the relations between logarithms and powers as a matter of necessity - he could look at a number and have a

My father was a wiz with a slide rule and understood the relations between logarithms and powers as a matter of necessity - he could look at a number and have a rough idea of what the natural log of that value was at a glance. I had a calculator - I am an expert at pushing the buttons but outside of a few select important numbers if you throw a value at me I'm not going to guess correctly - log10(7000) is clearly between 3 and 4 (it's in the thousands) - is it closer to 3.7, 3.5 or 3.9? Tools don't improve skills they replace but, at the same time, are those skills that are being replaced important to practice? If you've worked even briefly with vector math or game programming you know sqrt(2) is 1.41 being able to summon that value at will is essential if you're regularly doing vector addition - but sqrt(23)? Probably never going to come up. At the end of the day we need to decide whether these tools are helpful or not - in the very limited scope of UI building I think the answer is yes... a lot of front-end surface-level development has one right answer. For other things I am skeptical - and even for front-end work a developer that is considerate with their CSS classes and tag nesting will be a darling of the UI team compared to a developer that gets it to look right but does so with code that's difficult to understand or modify.