> I have seen what people are capable of doing when their tools get out of the way, and they are free to just create. This is how world class athletes, musicians, artists, writers, and of course programmers take what is in their mind and translate it into reality.
I think this is a fallacy. If you approach the question of how these people achieve the things they do with a bias towards tooling then you'll come to the conclusion that it plays a big role in their success.
In reality, many of these folks start with a very strong drive to achieve something and then the rest sort of follows. If you want to be a world class musician, start practicing an instrument. Ideally fall in love with music. The rigorous and meticulous practice routine comes later.
In other words: you can have the world's best tooling that gets out of the way, but you're still as unmotivated to do anything as before.
I think it's a cool idea and it sounds like a fun and creative endeavor. I don't want to talk it down. But I also wouldn't want folks to get the, in my opinion, misguided impression that "tooling -> success" is the correct order.
I'd go further. Some of the world's best tooling is only usable by the world's best users. Examples abound on this. The best drivers are in vehicles that I would almost certainly crash. Our best pilots are in planes that I literally don't understand the controls on. (That is true for the cars, too, oddly.)
A really good guitar is easy to miss notes on. Precisely because good guitarists don't typically miss.
Now, I think you could reword a little bit. The best performers know their tools very well. So well, that they often "just disappear" for them. This does require some level of quality in the tool. But requires a ton of effort from the performer, too.
As you get better at something you become more opinionated at what you need your tools to do. You demand more specific and tailored things from your tools and so you start to lean towards things that are more adjustable.
There is also the case that once your entire livelihood depends on something, consistency and muscle memory matter a lot. Lots of world-class athletes, drivers, and performers probably use tools that closely resemble the tools they learned and trained with their whole lives so they would probably seem kinda anachronistic to a newcomer.
You made me think of this quote: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
> If you approach the question of how these people achieve the things they do with a bias towards tooling then you'll come to the conclusion that it plays a big role in their success.
I think the point of the author in your quoted text is that you want to avoid the tools getting in your way. If you're a writer, you become successful by writing good stuff. That's harder to do if your OS crashes and you have to click through a bunch of menus while you're writing. That's the reason so many bloggers adopted markdown 10-15 years ago - writing in plain text meant the tools got out of their way. It's not about the tools making you more productive, it's about using tools that don't make you less productive.
I think of it a bit differently: if the tool is getting in the way, this will hamper the effectiveness and raise the barrier for skilled individuals to do their best. Yeah, the absolute top-tier max-talent people can do well regardless, but if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction.
> if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction.
I think YuukiRey's point is that this is not true. The bottleneck for people to do their absolute best is almost never tool-induced friction, until you've already built a strong pre-existing skillbase. Overwhelmingly it's motivation, interest, time, energy, etc.
In theory tools can help with this. In practice usually the pursuit of tooling ends up being a distraction. This is how you end up with the (overly derogatory) idea of GAS, "Gear Acquisition Syndrome." The equivalent of this for digital things is e.g. the writer who spends money and time trying to find the perfect text editor paired with the perfect keyboard paired with the perfect monitor etc, instead of just writing. There are of course exceptions where tooling is really the main unlocking feature, but those are far and few between.
In fact what I get from YuukiRey is the opposite of this:
> Yeah, the absolute top-tier max-talent people can do well regardless
Rather it's that the best tooling only really makes sense for top-tier people, because for almost everyone else the tooling is not the bottleneck.
Russian equivalent of this idiom sounds like "skillful surgeon helps a bad dancer". Even though it sounds confusing, what it really means is "a bad dancer blames his balls"
Right, I get that. That's their opinion, and I was expressing a differing opinion (that's why I said "I think of it a bit differently" lol)
I have recorded hundreds of songs using digital audio production software since ~1999. Switching to Logic Pro unlocked the opportunity for me to work WAY more effectively than a shareware tracker software I was using before (and Fruity Loops after that), in fact allowing production techniques that are literally impossible with a tracker. Not just large-scale features, but minutiae in how the interface works, "intuitiveness", ease of access like a single key-press to enter a certain editing mode, things like that.
When I am working with my mind and trying to be creative, every millisecond spent thinking about stupid UI quirks/peculiarities takes away from the part that actually matters: creating.
If the UI is obtuse, and I can't figure out how to employ a certain technique, the tool is hampering my progress. Conversely, a thoughtful feature in a tool can boost productivity and boost the success rate of reaching a "flow state"[0]. One example of this: there's a common technique to record multiple takes of the same segment of instrumental performance or vocals, and then layer those multiple recordings together to give more dynamism and depth to the sound. Infected Mushroom uses this technique a lot[1]. In Logic Pro 10 or so, they added built-in support for doing this, making it super easy to quickly/successively record multiple takes[2]. I don't know what other DAWs did this at the time, but if you're just learning, this is a really nice production process surfaced in a very low-friction way. Otherwise you are making a new track, recording, trying to line it up properly, making a new track, recording again, lining it up again, etc. It's also not even obvious that this is something you could do, but because Logic made it an actual built-in feature, its very existence also acts as a form of "tutorial" if someone is just exploring the UI or reading the documentation.
So, yeah, as a pretty amateur studio producer at the time, the "best tooling" allowed my skills to improve by a gigantic margin, compared to the slow progress I was making with inferior tools before that. I can't agree for a second that tooling doesn't matter or only matters for people at the top of their game.
Maybe it's a fallacy and maybe it isn't. But I often hear people say "I don't use tool X because it doesn't actually increase my productivity". X is emacs or debuggers or profilers or Linux or version control or code comments or whatever. And after observing such people work over time I decided that most of them are just trying to justify their laziness. YMMV.
I think this is a bit of an oversimplification, I see art and technology as more like a dance where it's unclear who's leading who.
E.g., quick high-level examples: Photograph invented led to Impressionism, Andy Warhol's entire oeuvre. Today one of the most talked about artists is Beeple (technology-forward in distribution medium, tooling, and even practice techniques [e.g., "dailies"]).
Music is probably where this is the most profound, take the trajectories of Miles Davis and the Beatles, both started their career with a fledgling recording industry, ended it record in sophisticated studios using instruments and studio techniques that didn't exist a mere 5-10 years earlier.
In electronic music this is even more pronounced, e.g., Native Instrument's Massive synth facilitating dubstep is a nice clean example, but if you've followed electronic music overall the connection is obvious. E.g., what dates most pre-2000s era music is that today musicians use DAWs whereas before it was less powerful hardware devices that had a more specific sound (and other arrangement and composition limitations).
This actually feeds into one of the points you made: Being successful at art (or anything really) has a lot to do with how excited and motivated you are to pursue it. It's easier to be excited if you feel like you're exploring new territory, ripe with untapped potential, and that's historically often been unlocked by technology. Whereas if you keep comparing your solos to John Coltrane when you're learning the saxophone, that's going to be demoralizing and you'll feel like you'll never get there so why bother trying. There's also diminishing returns, e.g., that music territory has been so thoroughly explored now, so the ROI on developing that specific skill (playing jazz at that level) has been reduced, because so much of that artistic space has already been explored.
If you tie that all back to the art itself, I'd assume today that we already have saxophone soloist who are more technically skilled than John Coltrane, e.g., the music theory is better understood, and we've had decades of iteration to improve practice techniques (there are tons of books and studies on this subject now). But you can't replicate the sheer excitement that those musicians must have felt as they unlocked new music possibilities by iterating on music theory (a form of technology), and recording as a new medium to share and learn from.
To be clear, most of what you've said I'd agree with, but I'd add more nuance like: Leverage technology to make the act of creation as exciting for you as possible, but the main goal of the excitement is to keep yourself practicing and improving. And also look for untapped potential (e.g., a specific example that's relevant today, I think GPU-based rendering is still under-explored today Beeple has been able to leverage this in his art, but I think the big barrier of entry [probably ~$10,000+ for hardware/software over the course of a career] means there's untapped potential there.
> Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, which is great. But on the other hand, when everybody has the ability to make magic, it's like there's no more magic—if the audience can just do it themselves, why are they going to bother?
Seems particularly funny in an article about Emacs, a piece of software that lets you get in situations where some portion of your "just create" time becomes "managing my custom emacs, please don't break".
One way to look it is to approach it as a creative practice. A good part of any practice is devoted to developing technique.
Some are just fine with a standardized but unoptimized tool while others are fascinated by building their own high-flying TUI. The journey is the destination. If all you create is a config file, it still counts.
I think this is a fallacy. If you approach the question of how these people achieve the things they do with a bias towards tooling then you'll come to the conclusion that it plays a big role in their success.
In reality, many of these folks start with a very strong drive to achieve something and then the rest sort of follows. If you want to be a world class musician, start practicing an instrument. Ideally fall in love with music. The rigorous and meticulous practice routine comes later.
In other words: you can have the world's best tooling that gets out of the way, but you're still as unmotivated to do anything as before.
I think it's a cool idea and it sounds like a fun and creative endeavor. I don't want to talk it down. But I also wouldn't want folks to get the, in my opinion, misguided impression that "tooling -> success" is the correct order.