[newsclues]

Tools are great, but there is a way to learn the fundamentals and progress through skills and technology.

Learn to do something manually and then learn the technology.

Do you want engineers who are useless if their calculator breaks or do you want someone who can fall back on pen and paper and get the work done?

[brookst]

Well what if their pen breaks? Perhaps a good fluid dynamics engineer needs to be able to create ink from common plants?

I get the argument, it’s just silly. Calculators don’t “break”. I would rather have an engineer who uses highly reliable tools than one who is so obsessed with the lowest levels of the stack that they aren’t as strong at the top.

I’m willing to live with a useless day in the insanely unlikely event that all readily available calculators stop working.