I don't know. It kind of bothers me when people says that - it usually comes up when discussing programming languages.
Yes, of course you should use the right tool. You could also say that it boils down even further to something like "don't be stupid". The fact that some abstraction covers a point doesn't mean that said point has no value in and of itself.
Agreed. The interesting point is always when is X the right tool for the job.
Pie charts is a good tool when you want to show the relative sizes of (a small number of) unordered data points. It is a bad tool for displaying Word features introduced per version, since it is not really interesting to see how many features were introduced in Word 2.0 relative to Word 95. (Never mind that "number of features" is pretty hard to quantify.)
A pie chart would be interesting to show e.g. the market share of Word compared to OpenOffice.
But the article, which my comment is for, says "Please don't use pie charts" which is not the right idea OR the heading is too sensational for HN IMHO.
Yes, of course you should use the right tool. You could also say that it boils down even further to something like "don't be stupid". The fact that some abstraction covers a point doesn't mean that said point has no value in and of itself.