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Comment by cocodill | Hacker News Reader

I don't like this approach. One is being peddled a bucket of old shit that might have been okay in the 80's for portability reasons. This portability is usually not necessary for my one time tasks anyway. Today there are really cool and small tools to do everything with comfort, and if you want some kind of portability you can still put static linked tools quickly on the given system. But of course that is a personal opinion and depends on the situation.

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> One is being peddled a bucket of old shit that might have been okay in the 80's for portability reasons.

Like unix or linux? One person's "bucket of old shit" is another person's reliable swiss army knife that is always there when you need it.

Like people learning vi because it's part of POSIX and "is always there". For me the only thing that helped me was to learn :q!

Really depends on your use case though. If you're always going to be working on your own machine, of course customize it to make yourself maximally productive. But if you're regularly going into new situations, it's good to know how to be effective with tools you can count on being there.

My (admittedly very lame) anology: you're hiring a ninja assassin and have two candidates. One tells you about all the special swords and staffs and and smoke bombs he carries, the other says I just need my hands. Who do you hire?

I have a simple thought about this. If your work involves many machines, you usually have enough permissions to transfer your programs. I think that the benefits of a pleasant way of working outweigh the effort.

And by the way, I would prefer the first ninja if the second one is handless.

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