Know Your Tools

Learning how to use a tool is usually pretty easy. Learning when not to use a tool is harder. Especially when your "tool" is a Turing Complete language. If a program can be written, it can be written in any turing complete language, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. In theory you can use sed to implement your workflow, but that's a very bad idea. Conversely, if you need to loop over a list of numbers and add them up you could write a bespoke program in Rust to read a file, add them up, and spit out the answer, but again, probably not the right choice.

In those cases it's relatively easy to see, but not always. Should you write your new tool in python, Go, or C++? Well, it depends. It depends on what you're familiar with, what your users are familiar with, the ecosystem the tool will live in, any additional tools/libraries you need, and, of course, the problem you're trying to solve.

And like most things software, these choices occur at all scales. Once you pick a language you have patterns and styles. Idiomatic forms differ across languages. What is your class structure/hierarchy?

At the other end of the scale is your architectural style. From layered monoliths to space-based event driven architecture, you have lots of choices.

The goal is to use the right tool for the job. We've all done, seen, and had to deal with the "I've got a hammer, so the problem must be a nail" syndrome, and it's close relative, the "I learned about a new technique so I'm going to use it everywhere" approach.

For me it was singletons. When I first learned about singletons they were the answer to all of my questions and problems. It was great. I had a place to store global state and I could access it anywhere. Then I started to use more of them. And they got more complicated. When I saw I had written a singleton that contained a couple of singletons and had internal logic I realized I had gone too far.

So before you pick up that hammer and nail in a screw, think about more than just if it will work. Make sure you're not using the wrong tool for the job.