In goals upon goals upon goals, I suggested that a fixation on developer tools is misplaced. This is not to say that developer tools are unhelpful, nor that they can’t have a significant impact on our work.
Consider the following, over-restricted, definition of what a programmer does:
A programmer’s responsibility is to turn a computer into a solution to somebody’s problem.
We have plenty of tools designed to stop you having to consider the details of this computer when doing that: assemblers, compilers, device drivers, hardware abstraction layers, virtual machines, memory managers and so on. Then we have tools to speed up aspects of working in those abstractions: build systems, IDEs and the like. And tools that help make sure you moved in the correct direction: testing tools, analysers and the like.
Whether we have tools that help you move from an abstract view of your computer to even an abstract view of your problem depends strongly on your problem domain, and the social norms of programmers in that space. Science is fairly well-supplied, for example, with both commercial and open source tools.
But many developers will be less lucky, or less aware of the tools at their disposal. Having been taken from “your computer…” to “any computer…” by any of a near-infinite collection of generic developer tools, they will then get to “…can solve this problem” by building their own representations of the aspects of the problem. In this sense, programming is still done the way we did it in the 1970s, by deciding what our problem is and how we can model bits of it in a computer.
It’s here, in the bit where we try to work out whether we’re building a useful thing that really solves the problems real people really have, that there are still difficulties, unnecessary costs and incidental complexity. Therefore it’s here where judicious selection and use of tools can be of benefit, as their goals support our goals of supporting our users’ goals.
And that’s why I think that developer tools are great, even while warning against fixating upon them. Fixate on the things that need to be done, then discover (or create) tools to make them faster, better and redundant.
