(this post was drafted in 2021 but never published. It is presented here with minimal copy-editing in 2025)
I want to tell you a story about proper tools for software development. I can’t tell you that story because I don’t think they exist. At least not yet. I know, I know. I’m using a tool to write this, and you’re using a tool to read it. Anything can be a tool. Our monkey brains will turn a broken stick into a tool, but I’m not talking about a broken stick. In search of better examples to draw upon, I’m going to explain some concepts from other professions. We are going to start by talking about a piece of glass.
It took us a while to get windows clear and unblemished, to make decent mirrors. In the evolution of plate glass, there was a material called float glass. Float glass is made by dropping molten glass on top of another molten material, such as tin. If you can avoid jostling the container, you get a piece of glass that is nearly perfectly flat. You might imagine that this is an expensive way to make a lot of glass. You would be right. Later on we figured out how to roll out glass that was perfectly flat and we don’t use that process to make glass. Or at least, not much of it.
If you’ve ever used hand tools for woodworking, or just engaged in some intense window shopping, you might have also heard about float glass. When you work with chisels and planes, you need them to be very sharp. Pretty much the only way to make a properly sharp edge is to get it to be very straight. There is a whole protocol where you start with a very flat sharpening stone, and you sharpen the blade while also avoiding warping the sharpening stone. Mostly it involves sanding it flat between uses, ‘wasting’ a ton of material.
It turns out if you really want a wood plane to work well, it’s not enough for the blade to be razor sharp. The body of the plane also has to be flat. Ridiculously flat. And how do you make something ridiculously flat? You polish it on something even more flat. Like a piece of float glass. Hand tool owners aspire to own a piece of float glass, or at least make friends with someone who does. Small pieces are cheap, but you can only flatten small tools with those. If you want to flatten something big, like a block plane, you need a huge piece of float glass, and those can weigh nearly 25 kilos. Definitely into ‘make a friend’ territory.
Where the wood shop has float glass, a good machine shop may have a box of little brass blocks. These blocks are exquisitely accurate weights and measures that can be used to calibrate the tools they use to measure parts. Those tools, expertly calibrated, can then tell you if this pin made on this machine will exactly fit in the hole made by this other machine.
Every field of skilled labor has a set of tools that are so precise that you use them to make (or fix) other tools. But the tool chain doesn’t stop there. Look through the catalogs and you will find regular tools that are anywhere from very smart to aesthetically pleasing. You can own a tool that is every bit as beautiful, literally or figuratively, as the things you can build with it. Possibly more so. These are the sort of tools that inspire you to go make something better than you’ve ever made before.
This is an area where software is unique, in a bad way. We do not have our catalogs of sexy tools to dream about, to aspire to some day justify the cost of owning them because think of the things we could make. Setting aside ‘reference devices’, which one might reasonably argue are for us the realm of computer engineering, where are our fine software-working tools?