"The individual who deserves most credit for its invention, the English clergyman and mathematician William Oughtred (1574-1660), came to believe the slide rule was dangerous since it removed the need for students to learn any underlying mathematical principles. ‘The true way of Art is not by Instruments, but by Demonstration,’ he complained. ‘It is a preposterous course of vulgar Teachers, to beginne with Instruments, and not with the Sciences, and so instead of Artists, to make their Schollers onely doers of tricks, and as it were jugllers.’"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n19/james-vincent/instrumental-tricks