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"people just need to pick the right tool for the job" is utterly useless advice, just as "you should do the right thing" is an utterly useless answer to an ethics question, because it doesn't help you decide what the "right" tool/thing is.

There are lots of considerations in answering that usefully. Fit for the particular problem domain is one of them, yes. But so is familiarity. And ease of hiring. And performance, stability, maturity, state of tooling, community, training resources and a zillion others. How do you balance all those? Wait, let me guess, "correctly".

Sorry about the snark, this has just been a personal peeve of mine ever since the Slashdot days, when any word salad whatsoever would get upvoted Insightful provided it contained the magic phrase "right tool for the job".



I don’t deny any of those things. I think you’re reading way too much into my statement. I understand why people pick familiar tools and the cost of hiring and training people and getting up to speed on new stuff. It’s always a balance, and it’s why I don’t really like these posts that completely dismiss JavaScript and act like it has zero benefits.

I was on a team recently that only wanted to do Rails apps. They only wanted to make monolithic apps. Any mention of a more modular design would be met with derision. I don’t think this attitude is unique, though. And it’s really hard to overcome and see balance when the entire team clearly has no interest in changing or updating their skill set.


It’s a quip used to remind people to work backwards from the problem they’re trying to solve, not the other way around.

I think it’s an appropriate response to blanket advice on choice of tech stacks.


It wasn't posited as advice to a specific question, but rather a guiding principle, which is still valid and bears repeating given the frequency of the mistake.




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