"Always avoid working with tools that have a helve"

My daddy told me, son, always try to avoid working with tools that have a helve. I succeeded, I would say. I do not have to work with such tools. At least not at a daily basis. I work as a software engineer. I work mainly with intellectual property. But sometimes I feel like I am working just because of those tools.

Just imagine your only job was to make a better hammer. I believed that a hammer proved to be optimal over the years. It is a mean of achieving a more complicated result. But all those software engineers working on operating systems or application middleware try to enhance tools for computer users or application developers all day long.

The software engineers use another tools to make tools for you. Those another tools like compiler must have been developed by another engineers. But this is not what I wanted to talk about...

The software engineers tend to think too much about their tools. It is good to know your tool, of course. But it should not be recognizable which tool you used. Usually, you cannot recognize a 9mm chisel trace on a sculpture. You should not design according to the tools you plan to use.

I keep asking myself how difficult is to master a programming language. Is it that easy? Is it just a syntax sugar you need to know? Let's take Java as an example. There are too many pitfalls you must know to understand complicated code clearly - thread local variables, dynamic proxy, anonymous inner classes. You can make sure that you do not know the language perfectly, just google sample questions for the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam.

I started programming in Java around 2001. I was able to develop my applications easily without studying many guides. I did not know almost nothing but the language grammar. Now, almost 10 years later, I feel like I know intuitively 95% of the language (some percents were gained very very hard).

And what now? After all, Java is just a tool. Like a software engineer's hammer. It is definitely less than 1% of my knowledge needed to do my job correctly. So big on one side and so small on the other side. What is the right side?

My biggest dilemma is whether I should ask for language specific details when having an interview with a possible new employee at my company. Or should I ask more sophisticated questions? "What are basic properties of each transaction?" or "What is an application server?". And what about assembler? Everything that works need assembler!