True, if I'm never challenged in my work then I never find reason to get new tools. Hopefully we're working on things that do challenge us and do expose us to the weaknesses in our tools - and force us to say "There's got to be a better way, how does everyone else do this?"
I think my little bit of pseudo basic was to extreme. I meant there is a temptation when faced with a problem you know already how to solve to do it with novel tools on the client's time. Like "I should do this in Forth, how hard could it be"
yes, and no. i still think that without exploring you are not going to find things way out of your comfort zone. sometimes its not "weakness" in your tools that should inspire you. you can write perfectly great stuff with imperative languages, but at some point you may want to try a pure functional language to get a perspective shift. its more so to see if there may be a better way, or a different way to do things. i am very glad i took two courses in haskell, despite the fact that i don't ever use it for work, just because it has changed the way i think about certain things and given names to concepts i only had a vague notion of before.
