I am insecure about using graphical user interfaces. E.g. IDEs, COTS systems, cloud tools, and ERPs. If I don't know what is happening inside the box I don't feel like I know what I'm doing.

Introducing: CLI!

Perfectly reasonable way to be

With your logic, no matter what you're using, if it's an abstraction, you don't really know what can happen. This way, even assemblers can be too much of an abstraction. Sometimes good GUIs can make operations safer and clearer than every other tool.

@aggelalex I look at maintainability for abstraction.

I was working with 20+ years of industrial code at one job and one of the biggest problems was legacy code. There were hundreds of computers and all of them ran their own software. When they needed a change I would look in the system and often said to myself, “Oh good. Visual Basic. This is a text editor fix.” The problem was that the layers of abstraction in the compiled projects became unmaintainable because the tools to assemble them are not maintained.

One driver for expensive specialized hardware was compiled in 1998 for 16 bit Windows. Vista ditched 16 bit support so the computer was locked into XP. So I used a tool to generate the C++ from the binary and recompiled it for 64bit windows. So the hardware device can live for another 20 years if it needs to.

Tooling changes. Software shouldn’t be tied to tooling In my mind.

@irene well then, the only tooling that will probably not change is the hardware. So good luck programming a computer with a magnetic needle and a disk in binary. Tooling is there to help you. And tooling will eventually get old too. The point is using the right tools for the job. I wouldn't eg. start a project in coffeescript, no matter how nice that language looks, and I wouldn't start a serious server-side app in Vala and Valum. There's a certain art in choosing the right tooling and technologies for the job. Depending your project on a company's tool that only exists to promote that company's main platform can only mean that your project will rot along with that rotten thing. But that was a lesson people learnt the hard way, after open source became prevalent.

@aggelalex It is like you think that I’m ready to kick my drivers to the curb Because they pair to my hardware.