| It is not just Science and Technology, but the Tools that empower Modern Man. |
I woke up one fine day, to the redness of the sky. The sun was not yet up, but I dragged myself out of bed. It was going to be long and tiring day ahead, just like any other day. My workplace is a good 10km from my residence. I had to hurry to meet the 10o clock deadline. I had already been twice late in the month. Once more late, and I would not be left with enough leaves to visit my village during Holi next month. It takes 2-weeks for a visit, and I had been saving up for it without taking an off even during illness during the last 6-months. I just couldn’t afford to waste it now. One more month, and the New Year would start, with new leaves allocated.
Due to the moonless night, I couldn’t figure out the time, and now I see the sun rising along the horizon. I skipped my breakfast, as hurried to work, as I had no horse, and it took around 2 hours to cover the 10km distance on foot. By the time I reached office I was already panting. Then I finally got down to hand copy a thousand prints of my article for the coming edition of our magazine.
No, this is not the description of the world today, thanks to our ancestors who had the hindsight to build upon existing technologies and left us a wide pool of tools we make use of. This is the description of the days gone by, the era that was and the era that still could’ve been. Now we have automobiles to travel, a watch to track time, and trains and even planes to make visits to hometown on the weekends, and printing machines to make copies.
Our ancestors left us a strong legacy of highly potent tools built with advanced technology. They learnt science, made advances in technology and innovated new equipment to solve old problems. Tools are the culmination of all their work. Tools are the reason why modern man achieves much more than his ancestors. Common man today covers much more distances in his life than navigators like Columbus could ever do. He enjoys so much of technological luxuries which Newton or Edison did not. Take away the tools and he would be no different from his ancestors. Have you witnessed the fright of a man left unarmed in a jungle. He would simply panic in front of a wolf. Provide him a gun and some armor, and he would hunt tigers and lions.
It is not just Science and Technology, but the Tools that empower Modern Man. Tools also make his life easier and more productive. It differentiates his era from the pre-historic. In his short lives, he accomplishes much more today than his ancestors. Tools give him the means to execute without actually toiling for it.
| The more you employ tools, The easier your life is, and The more competent you are. |
For writing code, besides the well adopted IDEs, there are a huge number of predefined libraries and frameworks. There are advances in programming languages with newer constructs to ease your lives. There are a number of reasons to dump C and use C++, and no counter-reason that cannot be avoided. I’ll leave those for another article. Plenty of tools have already flood the market for reviewing code and finding bugs, that employing people to do it is a waste of effort. Automated build environments have come up to do the testing as well.
The adoption of these ready made systems is quite low in the industry. It can be said that only because of a highly fractured software industry is such incompetence being sustained. As was seen in all mature industries in their transition periods, when a few players adopt new tools and become more competent, all other minnows are wiped out. When a farmer brings in a tractor for ploughing, manual ploughing in the neighbourhood no longer remains economical. When Babur invaded India with his highly equipped army, all fragmented states fell like a pack of cards. It is yet to be seen which software players pioneer the adoption of the advances in Tools and Technology and consolidate the market.
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