Hackers and Painters and Paint Brushes
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Wed Nov 30 22:55:58 EST 2022

I've been thinking a lot about dev tooling recently, with
looks at VSCode, Emacs, my Vim setup (still not quite
recovered from wiping my dotfiles to put a FOSS license
on them..).

In the past week, I explored:

* Tiling Window Managers and Applications that
  Leverage Them [1]
* Text Editors vs Code Editors: LSP and CoPilot [2]
* Emacs as a Platform [3]

In this post, I wanted to take a step back as more of a
meta-commentary on not the tooling, but my obsession with
it.

To continue Paul Graham's comparison of Hackers and
Painters [4], I think it's fair to say that text editors
are like paint brushes. Software users don't necessarily
care about the paintbrush used, but instead the painting
it made.

I had this realization last night that I've spent so much
of my free time, and even career (my first job being in
dev tools), studying paint brushes.  And not just the
brushes themselves, but also the types of brushes famous
painters used. I've spent a lot of time reading blogs
like usesthis.com and watching talks to see what the
greats used and then trying them myself. Why do Russ Cox
and Rob Pike still use Acme? Why does Brian Kernighan use
Sam [5]? Why did Guido switch from Emacs to VSCode [6]?
I felt the need to find out.

And I think what I realized is that the answer may be "it
doesn't matter". What matters more is what they've built
with it: their paintings.

The exception maybe is when the painting is the brush:
for example, Rob Pike built Acme.  I suppose for brush
builders, it's part of the trade to be up to date on what
brush weilders are using and why.

But for normal painters it feels like a distraction at
some point.

And that's not to say it's not worth studying how others
are painting--any craftsman should try to stay up to date
on the best techniques. But the more I grow as a programmer
the more I think it matters less what tools you choose
and it's not worth the mental and emotional drain to let
tool choices become religious or part of one's identity*


[1]: gopher://alexkarle.com/0/phlog/026.txt
[2]: gopher://alexkarle.com/0/phlog/025.txt
[3]: gopher://alexkarle.com/0/phlog/023.txt
[4]: http://paulgraham.com/hp.html
[5]: https://lexfridman.com/brian-kernighan/
[6]: https://lexfridman.com/guido-van-rossum/