The tool problem

I was happy for a long time with a simple single program that solved things. The a.out or main.c was all that was needed. The syntax and usage of the language I coded was all I had to remember.

Now I find myself searching endlessly for the dependent Maven artifacts, incompatible versions of them, try to understand some obscure hack deeply buried in a stack overflow comment, read up on API and frameworks that promised something but delivers something else on some open source code that is long abandoned.

Sure, software is eating the world and we are witnessing its onslaught. But that does not mean we have to spend more time on tools needed to solve the real problem than the problem itself.

How do we fix the tools problem ?