[jerf]

As the saying goes, it is a poor craftworker who blames their tools... but the popular understanding in our community that it means a craftworker should be able to do anything with crappy tools is wrong. The real meaning is that it's a poor craftworker who has crappy tools, but just keeps using them. They should either fix them or get better tools. It is a poor craftworker who blames their tools because it is a poor craftworker who continually uses blameworthy tools!

(Or, in other words, I 100% disagree with the original post. Tools do matter, and it is folly to think otherwise in the face of overwhelming evidence.)

Since our tools are Turing complete, we are in the unusual position of sometimes being able to use our crappy tools to carve out better tools within the tools themselves, but in general, you should be using the best tools you can. And, yes, it is completely fair to judge a tool as being either bad for a job, or just a bad tool in general. Craftworkers who refuse to make such judgments are not exhibiting wisdom, but lack of discernment.

That is not to say that you must always use the best tool to the exclusion of all else. Much as we may not like to hear it, we aren't really craftworkers here for the most part, we are engineers. If I got moved to a big PHP 3.0 project, I would not make it my first order of business to insist that we drop everything and rewrite it in $BETTER_TOOL. That's not a good engineering move. The quality of our tools is only one part of a very complicated melange of relevant issues. But we're still allowed to have judgments, and the fact that tool quality is not 100% exclusively determinative doesn't mean the only other alternative is that they must be 0.0000...% relevant.

[drewcoo]

> The real meaning is that it's a poor craftworker who has crappy tools, but just keeps using them

The "real meaning" of a common aphorism is the one that's obvious to everyone. That's the point of aphorisms.

If common aphorisms needed special "truth knowers" to explain them, then the words themselves might qualify as religion.

[jerf]

I don't live in Silicon Valley. I live in a place where trades are a much bigger portion of the economy, and much of my social circle is in them. This is the common meaning that everyone else around me knows. I've explained the programmer meaning of "it's OK to stick with bad tools and you should just expect the user's skills to make up the difference" to the people who actually work with physicals tools in the trades, and it is met with either befuddlement or open laughter. No one who actually works with physical tools for a living could possibly think what programmers think about tools. You only need to experience once in your life the night-and-day transition from a blunt saw to a sharp one to get it. A skilled user of saws does not sit there bashing away at wood with a blunt saw and expecting their "skill" to cut the wood. No job foreman will sit there watching you bash away with a dull saw and smile approvingly because he knows you're making it up with "skill".

This is a peculiarly programmer misconception of an aphorism that predates the entire industry of programming.