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Comment by housemusicfan | Hacker News Reader

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And a good carpenter understands that tools can be better or worse, and that a good carpenter who uses bad tools will be worse off than a good carpenter who uses good tools. It's not wrong of anyone (regardless of skill level) to demand better tools; power is not a blanket excuse for poor design. You can have powerful tools with non-dangerous defaults.

That idiom is so dumb.

There are 1000s of jobs that are incredibly easy with the tool for exactly that job but painful without, the auto industry alone has tonnes.

Software with footguns can be improved by removing the footguns.

A poor craftsman blames his tools... instead of fixing them.

How so many programmers read that as license to use crap tools boggles me.

Yeah, after that phrase confusing me for years, I concluded that it really means a good craftsman won't even have bad (ie blame worthy) tools to begin with.

Falso dichotomy. Tools can be "powerful" without being easy to misconfigure. To use a carpenter example, circular saws have guard shields that snap into place if the saw is free in the air. Seems like a good thing, no? Are saws meaningfully less "powerful" because of this security feature?

Shall we make straight razors illegal too while we're at it?

Let's not reduce everything to the least common denominator lest we end up like (formerly) Oregon where you couldn't pump your own gas because it was "dangerous" for the lay person.

Illegal? No, we don't need to do that. But we can certainly point out that safety razors already exist, are much easier to use safely and correctly, and do at least as good of a job for 99.9...÷ of people.

This also means that if someone chooses to use a straight razor it is immediate cause for suspicion of their reasons (e.g. it might be an aesthetic preference rather than dispassionately choosing the best tool for the job) and if they advise other people to use that tool, we can call that out as bad advice.

So we don't need to make Nginx illegal, or make that default illegal, but we can certainly point out that it's a foolish default when it offers no extra power to anyone, but offers significant risk to many.

I don't think you'd find a single woodworker anywhere who, if they could afford it, wouldn't prefer a table saw with Sawstop. How much are your fingers worth to you?

A poor carpenter blames his tools because it is the carpenter who maintains them. Unless you’re contributing back to upstream nginx’s code, the analogy isn’t apt. A carpenter could and should simply choose the best tool for the job, and when they determine what that tool is, maintain it as well as can be.

There are quite a few such foot guns in nginx, it's part of why I've moved to using caddy.

In the immortal words of Michael Bluth, a poor carpenter blames his shoddy tools.

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