⇥ Postscript to “the lost art of using your brain”

My recent blog post The Lost Art of Using Your Brain ended up on both Hacker News and Reddit, where it generated a considerable amount of traffic and comments.

Several of the comments were interesting and even improved on my original thoughts; for example, one point that was made concerned this sentence:

The third, finally, is that a lot of people are not taught to deal with the consequences of their actions. From childhood, they are told that they are special, that they deserve better, that it’s OK to be less than the best.

Some folks noted (correctly) that being nothing but the best is a bit of an absurd demand on any person. There can only be one “best” under any given set of circumstances, and that means ipso facto that not everyone can be the best.

The problem is that the word “your” slipped out of that sentence when I first wrote it; thus, I ended up writing “to do the best” and, on the second pass, my poor brain recognized that those words didn’t quite fit together and made me fix them the wrong way.

I actually meant to say “to do your best.” And I stand by that: it’s one thing to fail despite one’s best intentions and efforts, and quite another to fail because one is being lazy. Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude towards life these days seems to be the latter.

A number of people also took umbrage to my apparent dislike for IDEs. (I will leave those who seem to think that I am one of those “old guys who wrote assembler” and that I want us to work without tools at all to drown in their own stupidity. I have nothing to say to them.)

I have absolutely nothing against IDEs. The whole point of my post was that you need to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of every tool you use and decide if it works for you—including, of course, IDEs.

For example, I don’t normally use an IDE when I write server-side code. I’ve simply never had any reason to use one, and can’t find one that adds anything useful to my development process¹.

This doesn’t make me special. It doesn’t make me feel different. It simply makes me a person who doesn’t use an IDE when writing server code.

If you do use an IDE for whatever work you do, good for you. We have no quarrel as long as you don’t splash that fact around as if it makes you smarter than the rest of us.