What a great idea. I believe in this a trillion percent, due to the personal experience of watching myself and a stronger developer tackle similar problems at the same time. I relied on my brain and the standard tools of my system. He of course did the same, but also made a custom visualizer for the core of the algorithm. Night and day improvement!
So I'm a believer in the principles. But I'm also curious about throwaway743950's question. What are the things in the Glamorous Toolkit that concretely make it better for this style of programming than traditional tools? You say "[it] just happens to be a nice system of tools that make it easy to make more little tools", but that's got to be downplaying it. Switching environments is an agonizingly costly thing to do. What rewards await those who make the jump? Rubies? Emeralds? Custom views-with-nested-sub-custom-views? Curious (but not yet won over) readers want to know.
The economics of the situation aren't friendly to humans, because human intelligence doesn't scale up well. Take energy consumption-- once you're providing someone 3 square meals they can't really use any extra energy efficiently. So we try training up lots of smart people and having them work together, but that causes lots of other problems-- communication issues, office politics, etc.
Additionally you can't replicate people exactly, so even when Einstein comes along we only have him for a short while. When he passes away we regress.
Computers are completely different. We can ring them in power plants, replicate them perfectly, add new banks of CPUs, of GPUs, wire internet connections directly into them, etc.
This didn't used to matter because the old "computers can only do exactly what you tell them to do, just really fast" limitation. Now that computers are drawing, making art, modifying videos, playing Chess and Go preternaturally, playing real time strategy games well, etc we can see that that limitation doesn't really hold anymore.
At this point the economics start to really kick in. More machine learning breakthroughs + much, MUCH bigger computers over the next decades are going to be interesting.
So I'm a believer in the principles. But I'm also curious about throwaway743950's question. What are the things in the Glamorous Toolkit that concretely make it better for this style of programming than traditional tools? You say "[it] just happens to be a nice system of tools that make it easy to make more little tools", but that's got to be downplaying it. Switching environments is an agonizingly costly thing to do. What rewards await those who make the jump? Rubies? Emeralds? Custom views-with-nested-sub-custom-views? Curious (but not yet won over) readers want to know.