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Comment by goldfeld | Hacker News Reader

Always keep learning in your own pace, pick up technical books, learn a weird language, get acquainted with vim or emacs, bash, awk.. it might take a handful of years but eventually you'll feel in the know, have a strong opinion about most mainstream tech and scoff at rehashes and things that won't die from 5 years ago.

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> get acquainted with vim or emacs, bash, awk..

Erm, totally irrelevant to this.

> totally

tools are part of the trade, no? even if you don't use a particular one, having a decent understanding can provide a contrast to the tools you do use and perhaps improve your utilization in subtle ways.

I would disagree. Understanding different tools helps me to understand how co workers may approach a problem or teach me about why they use specific tools. VI mode in sublime may not make sense to a developer who doesn't know what vim is and why someone may choose to use it.

I prefer to invest my time in learning a new programming language, if I have to use my time to learn a new text editor (with a very steep learning curve) than it is absolutely wasted time. Modern IDEs do wonder and, honestly, the important thing in programming is not to minimise the amount of time that it takes you to write code, but to minimise the time that other people need to spend to read it.

Bash and awk are programming languages, although they're not something I'm keen on using.

> Understanding different tools helps me to understand how co workers may approach a problem or teach me about why they use specific tools.

I agree with this but that's not what he said. He quoted very specific tools needed to achieve this and that was the cause of my disagreement.

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