Yeah, for learning that's good. But for novel research, not so much. I do a lot of what I always call "fast math on a computer" because that was a by product of me writing my own tools to solve problems in grad school. I didn't have numpy and only very limited BLAS optimizations existed at the time, so I had to write lots of low level stuff. But the actual novel work was pretty small on top of that.
In my grandparent post I mentioned that I could redo my PhD thesis in about a week of work. Much of that is that I know where the dead ends lie now. But a lot is also that I could just take advantage of numpy and I could just write everything in vector math now and not need to code up my own linear algebra stuff.
This is my take from this as well. I doubt that the developer in this story is literally thinking "these tools make it impossible for me to progress", I'm sure they're aware there's some way past whatever roadblock is there. So I'm not really sure what the complaint is about. Is the developer supposed to say "boo hoo I'm so stupid I'm stuck and don't know how to unstuck"? Does it make the situation any better if they blame themselves instead of the tools?
