I mean, when I started programming, I could spend ours choosing the right library, tools, or whatever.
But nowadays, when I have an idea, I stick to C# and Visual Studio. Because that’s the language i'm familiar with for over a decade now. Which doesn’t mean I don’t look right and left - but still, I don’t want to think about my tooling.
1. The developers who fight over vim vs emacs or other tools. A defensive mechanism.
2. The occasional developer that spent their lives working with C and C++ who attack Rust but only makes excuses on why.
3. Myself who spends way too much time trying to find the "best" development environment rather than just coding.
And I'm sure people could mention a bunch of others.
It really cannot be understated how true this is. I've been trying to get back into digital music composition and arrangement and spent way more than I thought I did to get myself off the ground. I'm fortunate enough to be able to have the financial reserves to spend what I did, but in hindsight... man was a lot of it unnecessary. I've spent more time reading about and following discussions involving tools and sample libraries than I have re-studying music theory, orchestration, and actually producing something.
It doesn't help that in this day and age, there are a ton of choices a person can make. Both choice-paralysis and "screw-it-just-get-everything[-if-it's-on-sale]" are absolutely real phenomena.
> And now he sat there under the pink glow of his student's table lamp, preparing to sit the astronavigation exam for the thirteenth time. He found the process of revising so gruelingly unpleasant, so galling, so noxious, that like most people faced with tasks they find hateful he devised more and more elaborate ways of not doing it in a "doing it" kind of way. In fact, it was now possible for Rimmer to revise solidly for three months and not learn anything at all.
> The first week of study, he would always devote to the construction of a revision timetable. Weeks of patient effort would be spent planning, designing and creating a revision schedule which, when finished, were minor works of art.
> Every hour of every day was subdivided into different study periods, each labelled in his lovely, tiny copperplate hand; then painted over in watercolours, a different colour for each subject, the colours gradually becoming bolder and more urgent shades as the exam time approached. The effect was as if a myriad tiny rainbows had splintered and sprinkled across the poster-sized sheet of creamwove card.
> The only problem was this: because the timetables often took seven or eight weeks, and sometimes more, to complete, by the time Rimmer had finished them the exam was almost on him. He'd then have to cram three months of astronavigation revision into a single week. Gripped by an almost deranging panic, he'd then decide to sacrifice the first two days of that final week to the making of another timetable. This time for someone who had to pack three months of revision into five days.
> In his notes, Miyazaki purposely leans into sounding old and stuck in his ways. He rants about how he’s painted with nothing else for 40 years, how easy and cost-effective his tools are — and then he undermines himself by suggesting that, really, this is all he knows how to do.
There's a deeper truth which is easy to overlook here.
If you want to get good at some creative pursuit, you have to put a lot of time, attention, and decision making effort into the skill. All of those are finite resources.
It's really easy to squander an unbelievable amount of time and effort on choosing gear. Doing that is time not spent mastering the craft. You might get really good at picking shit out, but you won't get good at painting, or poetry, or song-writing, or whatever.
This is why so many successful artists seem stuck in their ways or dismissive of gear, or, conversely, fetishize certain gear. Those are all mental techniques to minimize the effort they spend on picking stuff so that they can focus that effort on creating.