[jksmith]

>>it's small enough to keep in your head

This. And the additional effect is that you can keep more of the problem domain in your head as well. I've been in this game a long time, and my experience has been that the simpler the dev tools, the more likely the programmers working on a particular domain will be SME's in that domain.

[jimbokun]

SME?

[bmelton]

Subject Matter Expert.

[threeseed]

My experience is that being a domain expert and simplicity of dev tools has absolutely nothing to do with each other. At the end of the day you have to understand the problem in order to implement it.

Whether you write it in Ruby, Java, Go, Assembler really doesn't change this. It just means you may take longer to do it.

And your logic falls apart. If simple dev tools translate to greater productivity then how do you explain the proven benefits of IDEs with all of their "complex" features.