I recently stumbled upon a very interesting article by Charles Petzold explaining how sophisticated tools can actually limit our creativity.

The text can be found here. I have had similar thoughts in the past, but his examples and argument are very well founded.

I have been programming for over 12 years, and have used all kinds of tools from simple text editors to full featured Integrated Development Environments (IDE) like Visual Studio .NET. While I find the sophisticated features of heavier tools to be time saving, sometimes I prefer to do my editing in notepad.

Now that I only program as a hobby, I am pulled toward open source languages and tools. Typically the tools used to develop in open source technologies lack many of the features found in complete IDEs. While I miss a few of the features in Visual Studio .NET, it has been refreshing and mind-sharpening to go back to the tools on which I learned to program in Pascal and ANSI C.

Most of my work these days is in PHP, and my development environment consists of a glorified text editor with syntax highlighting and FTP client.

It's a little slower but I know I have complete control over my projects.