Obviously you don't know me, but the implication that I'm not a "good" programmer because I like some of the features that an issue/task tracker provides over a text file is silly. Jira + Mylyn + Eclipse makes identifying which commits were related to what task just a few clicks away. Likewise I can open a ticket and Eclipse automatically opens all the files I was working with last time I worked on that ticket. If one of my friends wants to help out, I can just assign him a few tickets, and he gets the same benefits, plus I can know what he's working on ATM and what's been completed. Handling customer/client issues in a trackable public way is great, and easy release notes with links to the tickets are way better than cutting/pasting some text todo list.