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Where does this stupid notion come from that using powerful tools means you can't handle the less powerful ones anymore? Did your skills with a hand screwdriver atrophy when you learned how to use a powered screwdriver? Come on.

I use grep multiple times a day. I write bash scripts quite often. I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance of these tools. They have their place as a lowest common denominator of programming tools. But settling for the lowest common denominator is not a path to productivity.

Doesn't mean you should forget your skills, but it does mean you should investigate better tools. And leverage them. A lot.

> But a 1-liner in bash can be 10-100 lines of C#.

Yes. And the reverse is also true. bash is fast and easy if there's an existing tool you can leverage, and slow and hard when there's not.



Yes? That's a pretty basic phenomenon. When I started using calculators, my mental math declined. When I started typing, my handwriting got way worse.

The OP was saying "use IDEs but don't stop using lower tech tools, because they are powerful"


Precisely. Though there is a caveat.

Every person, including devlopers, have some constraints to what they're able to learn and use effectively. Those limits vary a lot from person to person, though.

For developers who learn technology a bit slowly (compared to some other developers, not the general population), some of these tools may not be worth the effort.

Also, these developers aren't necessarily low tier in terms of business value. They may have talents when it comes to understanding and communicating business requirements with other stakeholders in their organization, and their technical skills may be secondary to those skills and abilities.

BUT: For the general audience at HN, technical capability is central to their identity. Most people here have some capacity to learn technologies that go somewhat beyond the minimum skills required for a tech job. And for this audience, being confident on the linux/unix command line is generally worth the effort.




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