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RIGHT_TOOL

                                                  April 11, 2007

The Language Wars (and related
battles) get so irritating
that it's understandable for
people to look for a simple
way to cut through the knots.

A common dodge is is the pose of
pragmatic, practical professionalism:

  "I just use the Right Tool for the Job."
   
I often have trouble
figuring out what
they think that means.

There's this notion that problems come in
neat domain spaces with pointers to
appropriate "tools"...  You want to write
an operating system, use C, you want to write
a web site, you use P-- (uh, which P* do you
use again?).

I submit that if you've got a shop
full of programmers familiar with 
perl, java is never going to be
"the right tool", and vice-versa.

So, the "right tool" depends on
social factors, doesn't it?


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