Peter Marklund's Home

It's really nice how Ruby can liberate me from languages that I don't like as much and am not as fluent in, such as Bash, and Perl. Today I was tearing my hair over a little bash database backup script that I needed to write until I realized I'm much better off writing it in Ruby. Bash translates amazingly easy to Ruby with the syntactic similarity, the availability of the back ticks (`), and libraries such as FileUtils. Once I switched to Ruby the backup was solved faster and with more confidence.

This experience got me thinking of the expression "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". If I'm not mistaken the Pragmatic Programmers use not only the advice "use the right tool for the job" but also "master your tools". There is a pretty obvious contradition between those two pieces of advice. It's important to not be afraid of picking up new tools, but it's also important to not underestimate the cost involved in learning the new tools in depth. Some tools I seem to pick up and learn quickly, others I can struggle with for years without ever really feeling confident or happy with them.