Interesting. I seriously started with i8080 assembly (and Basic, Pascal, C, ...), then somehow got stuck at Python for professional programming.

That said, my path with IDEs is the reverse. I never really liked IDEs, and (to amusement of my university teacher) took a diskette with the editor I liked. (needless to say, the first thing I programmed on i8080 clone I had was the editor I liked because the stock one was utter crap. Those were days.). Then there was Emacs, and only recently I switched to PyCharm. And there has been only one reason for that: It provides nearly perfect refactoring (later another reason emerged: PyCharm has syntax-controlled merging functionality for many languages). That simple. To continue your analogy, your circular saw is indeed useless and unsafe. It's either hand-saw or miter saw for me :-) Depends on the project size.

Regarding the choice of a programming language, unfortunately, it's rarely up to us. In my hobby project I can use whatever I want from Forth to Haskell, but even if I was an enterpreneur fully owning a software company, I would probably had hard time hiring enough developers for anything but mainstream platforms...

One more remark though. I've never succeded in learning Java. Tried several times. It's not for humans. It's a target for some code-generation tools, which can tirelessly add all that bloat. It's not a circular saw - perhaps, it's a robotic arm with a saw .

As others pointed out regarding type safety: In some languages one does not need to decorate each and every function with type declaration. Type system can do it for you.