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by jpt4 3675 days ago
Temper the soldier rather than steel, and a club becomes a sword. A fairer example might be to compare the Nix and Guix package manager codebases, which aim to implement the same model of declarative system wide dependency management. The former is written by a university team in C++ and Perl, the latter by GNUcolytes in Guile Scheme and a touch of C.
3 comments

> Temper the soldier rather than steel, and a club becomes a sword.

WTF, I haven't heard that one before. Did you make it up?

When I google it, your above comment is the third hit, and the previous two aren't relevant.

The exact phrase, yes, but I read "Temper the fighter, not the sword" here: [0].

The general observation that either the tool or the operator can be improved in an operator-tool system is semi-regularly invoked in discussions of new programming languages/EDC multi-tools/governance models within my conversational circles.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/systema/comments/3lcn5q/systema_lin...

Well, which do you say is better?
None sadly, one will be relegated to the "just an academic curiosity" phase, the other one to obscurity. [1]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005646

I'm wondering too ^-^
That's a very nice proverb, love it.