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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

They're all just tools. There's things to be discussed tool to tool (language to language) for sure, but I generally agree with the idea here.

>woodworkers take pride in the finished product, and seeing that finish product being used. They are not all hot on the tools they use

For a while another hobby of mine was photography, and oh man photography has so much tool talk online that I lost interest in any online discussions / forums. Comparing this lens to that and so on was so prevalent that it seemed entirely disconnected from the hobby of actually taking a photograph.

Decades ago I took some outstanding photographs with an early days digital camera that would be greatly outclassed by a random camera on a smartphone now, but does that matter?

I suspect it is because high level talk about tools is just easier than talking about the actual code / effort and hard work it is to make a thing.

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I can’t find the source of this quote, but it applies here: “the hallmark of an amateur is the focus on tools”. Obviously tools matter, but professionals know how to balance getting the best environment set up, and actually producing what they need to make.

I heard that quote when I was an aspiring musician (trombone). Once when I was complaining to an instructor that my horn just couldn’t produce the sound I wanted, he took it, played the passage beautifully, and said “sometimes it’s the fiddler, not the fiddle.” A humbling, eye-opening experience that has applied to all of my professional experiences.

..or those productivity porn out there.

Amateurs seek new apps, novel idea, or that best trick that will cure all procrastination. I've been there, and still be sometimes, but much less now since the system began to click and taking shapes after numerous (failed)attempt.

(Well, that made me semi-amateurs I think)

Professional have their own system(usually simple and routinely) and run their life with it. My mom and her trusty pencil & notebook run our household budget for fifty years!(and still going) I can't imagine doing that without some Excel...

Although I'm sure we're all amateur at some point in life...

First of all programing languages are not tools, they are more like tool builders. Programming languages are used to build real tools aka libraries like http server, db library, html templating etc which are then composed together to form an application.

So not only does the programming language choice dictate what kind of tools you have available but also what kind of tools are easy to make and how to compose these tools. Even taking open source tools into account, different libraries in different languages can behave quite differently so the programming language choice matters a lot. It affects how you think about the problem and what solutions you end up with

It’s the same with guitar forums (well, “was” since no one is on forums anymore), it’s 99% cork sniffing and 1% people actually sharing their playing.

Interestingly bass forums were better than guitar forums around this. Still mostly gear chat, and lots of discussion about cabs (fearful bass cabs are cool, it's true), but since many venues bass would go preamp->front of house, and you wouldn't really have much control, seems like people were more likely to just deal with not having "perfect" tone. If anything, power was the biggest vice. "Oh we play outdoors once a year, I need 2000 Watts to feel it properly on stage."

Cork-sniffing is a great phrase

> For a while another hobby of mine was photography, and oh man photography has so much tool talk online that I lost interest in any online discussions / forums.

This has been my experience too!

Can relate. Snobs know every single line of specs document, yet forget the camera costs $10K and no matter what,it will produce absurdly high quality that wil be enough for years to come.

> They're all just tools

Wherever tools are used there are tools made of shit. Thus we need to discuss the tools.

one of the most advanced simulator-type games is built in a custom programming language/engine so shoddy that people struggle to maintain it, and yet every single attempt to replicate it in "better" languages/engines has so far failed. This game was originally built by 1 person.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_13)

Honestly, I think devs love to overanalyse tools as a form of procrastination. A poor carpenter blames his tools, after all.

I don't mind some tool discussion but:

>Wherever tools are used there are tools made of shit.

I find it's super easy to shit on tools. That doesn't mean another tool is better / will have a better outcome. Most of the tool talk is very focused on a few problems that I am not so sure actually point to the outcome of using it.

My long-time colleague Jordan said it this way. "In my toolbox I have a red hammer and a yellow hammer. Sometimes one is the right tool; sometimes the other one. I don't get all wound up around 'red hammer is best'."

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