Stop complaining about tooling
In the end, everything is a tool. Especially you.
How many times have you read one of these complaints in a comment online, or heard it in person?
A library is:
- Slow
- Overkill
- Too bloated
- Too complicated
- Too much boilerplate
- Not enough boilerplate
- Doesn't cook me dinner
Most likely countless times. If you have some experience, it's easy to write those people off for any number of reasons. But if you're a beginner, you're probably trying to read as much information as you can absorb as quickly as possible, and comments like these are bound to throw you off.
You see comments talking about how terrible a tool is, but then you see the gigantic community around it with countless people using it. Who should you listen to?
Don't make any decisions based on what someone online says and instead make informed decisions based on personal experiences. The best way to learn is to physically use the tools.
I hope to explain why the use of tools shouldn't be some arguing point, and instead should just be part of the world that you can either accept or ignore. And I'll explain why using birdhouses.
To build a birdhouse the absolute bare minimum you need is a hand saw, a hammer and nails, and maybe some sandpaper and paint. These tools can be bought for a few bucks, and that's literally all you need.
Now lets say your birdhouses are really popular and you're selling them online. Sawing and sanding all of the wood by hand is really tiring you out. So you buy some electric tools from the hardware store.
Maybe you buy a table saw, a router, and a power sander. They cost a bit more, and you need to take more precautions when using them, but they quickly pay for themselves in the amount of time they save.
Now imagine that for some strange reason the popularity of your birdhouses has exploded. You scale up production and you now own a small birdhouse factory. You hire multiple workers and tons of heavy machinery to enable your workers to produce a thousand birdhouses per hour.
At each step, the tools you purchase make sense for the level of production. At the same time, the tools next level of tools are inconsequential. The guy making a birdhouse in his garage isn't even thinking about a million dollars worth of automatic planers and jointers. The increase in cost and complexity makes sense when it returns an increase in volume and quality of birdhouses.
My point is, there are a large number of developers that need simple tools and that's fine. But there are also developers that need to write much more complex code. To do so, they reach for more complex tools. Sure, some of the tools require more experience to fully grasp, and they may take more time to read the documentation to learn how to use them, and they will require more effort to utilize. But they exist for a reason.
You can argue about which tool is better, but you can't argue against their use in the first place. Nobody would use tools if they weren't worth it. The idea is to spend more time up front which saves more time later.
Everyone has their biases and certain experiences. But at the end of the day, nobody cares about how you wrote your code, or the tools you used. They care about what was created. A tool might be overkill for you, or too complicated for you, but that doesn't mean the tool itself is not useful for others.